


[S] Rebuild.

by nickel710



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Adult Trolls (Homestuck), Earth C (Homestuck), F/F, Gen, Growing Up, M/M, Rebuilding Earth and Troll societies, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-15 15:37:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9242057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickel710/pseuds/nickel710
Summary: On Earth C, the victorious players--those who made it, anyway--begin the task of establishing a new, mixed-species world. Karkat struggles to understand his role on Earth C. Shameless Davekat feels ensue.Chapter 4, "Interlude: A Journey, A Return, A Realization" posted!Things to expect in this: thinking through how Earth C would develop; descriptions of how Earth C is; Davekat feeling jams; some Davekat fluff here and there; growing pains, literal and figurative; eventually, adult homestuck characters of all species; Rose being Rose; some issues related to post-traumatic stress.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for clicking! I wanted more Earth C stories so I wrote my own. 
> 
> Story looks like it's taking a three part structure: Chapter 1 is standalone, 2 & 3 is a two-parter, and the third arc isn't fully formed but I'm anticipating 2 chapters.
> 
> Update: Oops now there's an interlude.

On the first day on Earth C, everyone was too excited and exhausted and shell shocked to even start to think about what was happening. The game was over. They had played, and lost, and lost again and again, and then… they had won. John’s dad made a bonfire and everyone was scrambling to find seating so they could all enjoy its warmth, but Karkat stood back for a moment and watched everyone, a horrible and wonderful feeling in his chest.

Mostly he felt sad. Terezi, Kanaya, and himself. That was who had made it from his session. Maybe Vriska, Sollux, and Aradia were still alive somewhere out there in paradox space, he didn’t know. But maybe they weren’t. And the others surely weren’t… Gamzee, Feferi, Nepeta, Equius, Tavros—hell, even Eridan—friends, lost. Not a single troll from the Beforus crew had made it.

The humans had fared better, of course, thanks especially to the Maid of Life. Karkat couldn’t help but feel just a touch bitter about that—a Maid of Life? How much more OP could a healer get? But he knew he wasn’t being fair. Jane’s powers hadn’t been around to help John, Rose, Dave, and Jade make it through their own session and on to the Alpha. That had been… well, if not skill, then lots of dumb luck, good timing (ha, _Dave_ ), and maybe even a bit of help from Karkat and his merry band of trolls.

Bitter resentment aside, the absences of his dead or missing friends weighed on him as he imagined how good it would have been to see Sollux or Nepeta’s face glowing in the warmth of that bonfire. Then his eyes met Dave’s, and the other knight jerked his head sideways, beckoning Karkat to join him, and a bit of his sorrow eased as he rejoined the group.

They sat side-by-side, not quite touching. The Alpha humans were the most lighthearted (except Dirk, of course—was he ever _not_ brooding?), perhaps having lost the least. John was right there with them, joking and flirting and only occasionally falling silent with his eyes unfocused on the fire. Karkat noticed when this happened, and also noticed that Dave would always say something at that point, drawing John back, encouraging him to tell a story or goading him into indignant jeers.

Rose was settled deep into Kanaya’s arms, the pair of them smiling faintly and only periodically tossing in words. Jade, who had not had much time to get acquainted with many of the others yet, mostly watched, too, though like Jake, she was easier to draw in to the shenanigans. Calliope joined Jane and Roxy’s theatrics, sometimes shy and sometimes bizarrely bold in her role-playing. Terezi would cackle and loudly proclaim her need to sniff out the bullshit happening, but then would lapse into silence as her moirail’s voice failed to chime in and encourage further nonsense. Karkat felt pangs of sympathy whenever this happened; though he still felt ambivalent about Vriska and all the trouble she had caused, he wished she were present if only to spare Terezi her loneliness.

Dave did the Dave thing. He joked, rambled, self-aggrandized, and rapped. He bickered loudly with anyone who would bicker back, mostly John and sometimes Jade or Terezi. A few times he even got Karkat going, despite the latter’s somber mood.

Soon enough the fire had died down and the jovial spirit of the group mellowed along with it. People lapsed into silence. Jake and Dirk sat close to each other, talking in low tones, looking uncomfortable. Rose fell asleep in Kanaya's arms. Terezi stared up at the stars blindly, undoubtedly pining for her moirail. Jane, Calliope, and Roxy laid down side by side, hands clenching one another’s. Jane wept for a bit. Jade asked if she could sit next to Dave and he opened his arms and she willingly curled up against his chest, sad and lonely and unsure of where exactly she fit with this group of mostly strangers after three years away from each other.

Karkat wasn’t jealous, exactly. He was glad Dave and Jade had each other, glad they found solace in their proximity. But Dave wrapping his arms around Jade so casually when he had been rather cautious about touching Karkat even by accident all night did make an icy stab of fear climb up the troll’s spine.

On the meteor, there were many subjects he and Dave never spoke about, like the finer points of cooking or tea pots (well, once Dave extemporized at length about tea pots to no real end, but the point stands), but only one that they actively avoided. The question of the future, a future after Sburb, was too full of uncertain impossibilities and unanswerable questions, even for Rose. The truth was, the very likelihood of their survival was slim. Lord English seemed unbeatable from the heart of meteor, despite nights of sometimes drunken bravado about who would be the one to actually take him down. Fuck, even Jack (and… Jack and Jack and “Jack?”) scared them enough that their once-in-a-while boasting about how much they would own the battle with him/them felt mostly empty and superficial.

But even when Karkat had privately entertained the idea that they did win, and both Dave and Karkat survived the battles somehow, the uncertainty of what that meant had staggered him. Would they actually all just get to live on the same Earth? Could they pull that off? Or would Sburb fuck everything up again, change the course of their “game” once more? One of Karkat’s nightmares was that they would all end up somehow back on their home planets, stuck in their younger bodies, memories of their struggle to save the universe but no change to what had once been their routine.

And when he did start thinking about all of this, the worst part was that he suspected his own role in all of this was just to play some kind of dumb romantic interest to the real hero of the story. There was no denying that everyone else on the meteor (or Jade’s golden ship, for that matter) was one of the strongest players ever to enter the medium. The other trolls who had made it were undoubtedly the strongest among them—Terezi, Vriska, Gamzee, and Kanaya had always been the most formidable among their twelve. The god tier Beta humans—Jade could _teleport planets_. John single-handedly retconned three plus human years of their lives and saved literally everything from extinction. Rose orchestrated their success with the kind of planning and foresight that only a Seer of Light could pull off. And Dave… well, Dave was the guy who would cut off his own brother’s head to save the world.

So why had paradox space kept Karkat around? He wasn’t some god tier Knight who could turn create clones of himself, or bring his friends back to life, or fix timelines in the outer ring. He never even really learned what his aspect was about. Unlike Kanaya and Terezi, he was not a strong fighter whose presence in battle would benefit his team. One night, lying awake with his head nestled on a sleeping Dave’s chest, he thought maybe he had stumbled upon the answer. Paradox space wanted to reward Dave so it threw Karkat into the mix to be a good time killer for him.

Maybe Echidna’s decision, at least according to Kanaya, that Karkat should stick around to help lead the new troll society—maybe that was part of it, he now understood. But still, looking at Dave resting his cheek on the top of Jade’s head as she wept into his shirt, he couldn’t help but wonder if he and Dave had found willing lovers in each other on the meteor simply because they were all they had. He didn’t feel that way about Dave, but… they had never talked about it.

Of course now that they were here, on Earth C, Dave had all of his friends back. He had something like his old home back and in need of rehabilitation. Karkat, though still unsure about what his role would be, had dedicated himself to Kanaya’s cause to rebuild the troll race. Tomorrow he and Dave would go their separate ways, do their separate tasks, and Karkat would not let the guy behind the shades know just how much that was breaking his heart.

~-~-~

At some point Jade had teleported away and back again with tents and sleeping gear for everyone from one of their planets. Perhaps from her old house; Karkat seemed to recall one of her “family” members being some kind of “outdoorsman,” which this gear certainly seemed to belong to. Someone (guess who) asked for a scalemate and Roxy spent some time creating stuffed animals out of nothing to the delight of Terezi, Calliope, Jade, and John. Then things settled down again as tents were erected and people disappeared into them to finally collapse and attempt to sleep.

Karkat was just zipping up his tent flap when a pale hand caught the zipper and tugged it back. Dave’s face appeared in the opening, eyebrows raised above his shades with a look that might have been accusatory or inquisitive, if Karkat could have seen his damn eyes.

“Sup,” Dave said.

“Oh are you talking to me again?” Karkat said nastily, not even sure why he was snapping.

Dave held still for a minute, then said, “Can I come in?”

Karkat gestured one clawed hand in something that apparently Dave took to mean “be my guest,” so the red-clad Knight stepped inside, settled down so he was sitting cross-legged opposite Karkat, and zipped up the flap. The tent was small enough that they were sitting a bit hunched, knees touching.

Dave took off his shades.

With a pang of guilt, Karkat could tell that Dave had been crying. His eyes were wet and rimmed with red. Had Jade even noticed, curled up in his arms? He would have noticed. Dave had never really cried very much—Karkat could think of maybe twice on the meteor that his cool had broken and something raw and hurt and fierce had poured out of him. 

“Are you okay?” he asked after a moment.

“Why do you think I’ve been ignoring you?” Dave answered, dodging the question.

“I didn’t say that,” Karkat said.

“Dude. The first thing _you’ve_ said to _me_ all night is ‘oh you’re speaking to me again?’”

Karkat fidgeted a little, grabbing his pillow and fluffing it in his lap. “Well, you haven’t really been talking to me,” he pointed out.

“You haven’t been chatty, either, bro,” Dave responded, shrugging. “I figured you were dealing with your shit and I was dealing with mine. I didn’t think we had to like have a fucking heart to heart around the campfire, but if that’s what you wanted we could go back out there right now and have the best fucking emotion jam you can possibly want. People will be coming out of their tents sobbing with no idea why and it’ll be because we’re just jamming _so hard_ that they’ll feel it without knowing—”

“Shut up, asshole,” Karkat snarled finally, not really feeling the lighthearted playfulness that was masking something deeper from Dave today. 

“Wait so do you want me to talk or not, bec—”

“Dave, seriously. Please.” This actually succeeded in shutting Dave up, because Karkat almost _never_ said please. Karkat fidgeted more with his pillow, not sure what he wanted from this interaction, but feeling strangely more alone and small than ever.

“Karkat,” Dave said after a moment, an unfamiliar note of uncertainty or maybe… panic? in his voice. “What’s going on? What are you thinking about?”

Karkat lost his nerve to say anything, to question Dave about what their relationship would be now that they were here, on this new Earth, with so much to do but in some ways so much less. One planet to tend to, instead of many. No battlefield, no Derse and Prospit politics, no culling drones or Skaia or dream bubbles. Just… this one Earth. Yes, part of him wanted to demand to know right now, but mostly he didn’t want to hear Dave tell him he preferred Jade, or nobody and just wanted to go fucking _find_ himself or some other human bullshit.

“Nothing, I just… I just want to get some sleep.”

Dave looked a bit taken aback, the uncertainty from earlier coming back with a vengeance. “Oh,” he said, unconvinced, then scratched at his ear. “Should I… go?”

“Stay,” Karkat said quietly, tugging at his hand and pulling him close as he curled up on the cushions and blankets Jade had brought. He pressed his back into Dave’s chest so they wouldn’t have to see each other’s pained expressions, and let him cover them with blankets and wrap an arm around his waist.

Before the others were up, though, Dave rose (no alarm clock needed for him, these days) and made his way to his own tent, leaving Karkat cold and awake and dreading what the day would bring.

~-~-~

Roxy and Kanaya led the group the next day, marshalling their troops like women on a mission. Which they were. Roxy sent Jade for the ectobiology equipment while Kanaya tended to the matriorb, preparing it and herself for what was to come. After Jade returned, Roxy sent her again to bring back transporters from Derse and Prospit. Meanwhile, Karkat, John, and the Mayor were rounding up all of the Carapacians who had made it this far. The night before they had been left to their own devices in their refugee camps on Jade’s tiny worlds, but they had been brought over first thing. Jade grumpily pointed out she could have done all three runs in one trip if Roxy had just told her what all she needed, but Roxy just wonked and turned her attention to Dave.

“Dave, we need everyone to prepare themselves to be scanned for paradox clone sludge,” she told him. “Can you and Calliope work on a schedule? We want as many unique combinations of DNA as possible from each species, so people will need to be patient while we make several clone sludge bottles from everyone.”

“How long will each person have to wait while the sludge is made?” Calliope asked, already brandishing paper and pen for the schedule.

“Talk to John or Karkat, they did the cloning stuff before,” Roxy said, her attention already shifting to Jane, who was organizing food supplies for the transports with Terezi’s help. Jake was consulting maps with Jade now, who would transport herself and come back with new information for him to mark on the maps. Dirk was helping this endeavor, having more knowledge than everyone but Roxy about the dead Earth they were standing on. Jade would take one or both of the boys with her sometimes so they could carry and distribute supplies to new locations that would later be occupied by Carapacians and lots of paradox babies. Kanaya and Rose were making sure hospitable areas for troll wrigglers were being set up.

Dave approached John about the paradox cloning situation, and soon enough he and Calliope were well underway on their schedule. They had to calculate each human’s offspring potential differently to avoid genetic overlap—no good to use Rose and Dave’s slimes together, as they were already genetic siblings and their paradox offspring would be more likely to have harmful or unwanted genetic traits. Same with Jade and John, but not Jane and Jake—on they went, calculating each one.

At the end of the list when they had figured how many unique paradox babies could be made, Dave paused as he capped his pen.

“Do you think… we can make new pairs by matching trolls and humans?”

Calliope thought this over for a minute, then looked like she had literally just heard the _best possible news_. “Oh,” she cooed, beaming at him. “Oh, Dave! I hope so! Troll/human hybrid babies! Oh my gosh.”

She rushed over to John and Karkat to start questioning them on the possibility. Dave followed more slowly, already feeling decidedly awkward that a good number of the human babies they were about to produce would be his and John’s biological children. Yeah, that was already weird enough, but thinking about one of the babies being his and _Karkat’s?_ That was especially… he shifted his feet uneasily, looking back at the schedule, imagining his and Karkat’s ugly-ass kid and its cranky little face with shades on and while he in no way wanted that to happen today, he thought, yeah, maybe someday that wouldn’t be so bad.

He was pretty damn sure he was blushing. Fuck.

John loved the idea of troll/human babies, of course. He scooped up Calliope and flew to where Roxy was to discuss the idea with her, leaving Dave and Karkat shielding their eyes from the gust of wind in their wake.

“So, how about it, K-man, you want a little Davekat monster running around? Karve? No, hell no, not Karve. How about just Dave Jr., hell yeah, I could get behind a little Dave with horns, how fucking sweet would that be?”

Instead of answering, Karkat grabbed the schedule and looked it over. “Are you only making one set of genetic identicals?” he asked.

Dave blinked at him. Including genetic material from Dad Egbert, they had about thirty, thirty-five unique baby possibilities. That wasn’t enough to repopulate the Earth. Then again, once they made this first set of clones, the genetic possibilities became much wider. And if they were a little less careful with the overlapping of genes with this first generation—like, a half-Jake baby could be used to make a new paradox baby with a half-John baby, given the distance and diluted nature of their genetic relation—then they could make hundreds of new genetic combinations.

How strange to think that the entire human population on the planet would descend from the two family groups right here. “Good thing for humanity that the Strider-Lalonde family tree is so damn beautiful,” Dave muttered, earning himself a confused look from Karkat, who hadn’t heard any of the thought process to get Dave to this statement.

The moment stretched and neither said anything, but just as Dave was opening his mouth to engage Karkat again, some shenanigans broke out between some former Prospitians and Dersites and Karkat took off toward the group waving his arms and yelling. It made Dave smile—it was nice to see Karkat’s inclination toward loudly bossing people around put to good use. Roxy was a savvy leader.

He left Karkat to sort out the Carapacians and checked in with Calliope and John, broaching the topic of multiple clones from each combination of two people.

The day progressed.

They decided to go for the human/troll hybrid but cautiously. After all, they would be creating an entirely new species and they did not know whether or not their genes were compatible enough for ectobiology and paradox cloning. But if there were ever an opportunity to stretch the limits of the universe’s laws of reproduction, it was this moment. In the wake of the rebirth of the cosmic frog, the reverberations of the great glub were still sounding and other-universe Calliope’s fully realized Muse of Space symphony was still rippling around them, making the possible out of the impossible.

So yeah, _hell_ yeah, human/troll hybrid species was a fuckin’ go. Cautiously.

It would take a day or two to sort everything out. The cloning process began that evening with the humans lining up according to Dave and Calliope’s schedule, to have John (or Dirk, when John was busy standing still to have ghost sludge made of himself) collect their sludge. They stored each sludge in jars but did not start the actual cloning. Roxy mistakenly put Terezi in charge of labeling the jars of sludge at first and realized her mistake when, three jars of Jade sludge in, each jar was marked with an incomprehensible drawing that apparently _tasted_ like Jade. Roxy took Terezi off labeling duty and asked Karkat to take over.

Dave posed so that each one of his paradox sludge selves appearified in the machine in silly poses, making John, Roxy, and Jade giggle with each new ridiculous sludge form that would promptly fall into a pile and get sucked into a Dave jar. Karkat started doodling the different poses on the jars after writing “DICK BAG” (an insult he had adopted from Dave a year ago) instead of “DAVE.” Roxy noticed far too late to do anything about it. Listening to his friends laugh as a paradox sludge form appeared touching its own ass, Dave thought, yeah, he could do this forever, finding ways to get Jade and John to laugh. He loved it when he was the reason those two were laughing.

His turn was over and Rose sat herself down in his place, reading a book while John did his ghostly work. Dave hung around Karkat as he labeled the jars, making suggestions about what to write instead of “ROSE” on each one. Karkat did not take the suggestions but Dave was pleased that he managed to get some snorts of laughter and a few successfully baited rises out of the troll. Soon enough though, Roxy was demanding his attention elsewhere, and he reluctantly left Karkat’s side to confer with Terezi and Kanaya about the timeline for when exactly would be their best bet to turn time ahead and rejoin their advanced civilization.

Soon enough the sun had fully set and the Carapacian camps were settled for the night, leaving the Creators, as they were being called now, to another evening of sitting together and processing. It had been nice to keep busy but god was Dave tired, and the more tired he felt the harder it was to block out all the shitty feelings of loss and emptiness and anger that he had started to notice in himself since the end of the game yesterday. This rebuilding Earth thing was fine and all, but shit. Everything had changed so damn fast. For the second time in his life, his world had been upended in a day. From Earth A to the Medium, and now the Medium to Earth C. At least with the launching of Sburb he hadn’t had time to really think about it. It had been go, go, go from the minute he had been connected into the game. Now though, it was over, and everything was just… waiting.

Tonight the mood among the Creators was more overtly somber and quiet. Little bits of laughter broke out here and there, but for the most part everyone had settled into small groups or pairs, talking quietly among themselves or sitting in companionable silence. Dave had been sitting with Dirk but when he noticed Jake hovering and looking like he wanted some bro time, he made his excuses and wandered over to where Karkat sat next to Rose and Kanaya.

He settled himself beside Karkat, reaching out to gently touch his knee. Karkat actually jerked his knee away, shocking Dave, whose hand recoiled instantly. Before he could get control of his face, he knew that a hurt and surprised expression had plastered right there for everyone to see.

Shit. _Shit._ Things had been weird yesterday, but yesterday had also been their first day on this new Earth, so Dave had chalked it up to that. Had he done something? Why was Karkat treating him like he had forgotten his goddamn birthday or something? He drudged around his memory for anything that might tip him off as to why Karkat was mad at him, but all he could come up with were damn cliches from Karkat's romcoms. Had he, like... forgotten his birthday or something? Trolls didn’t really celebrate birthdays, or wriggling days or whatever the hell they were.

Whatever, Dave had no idea what he could possibly have done to piss him off, and he wasn’t in the mood to play a guessing game or try to pry it out of him. So he bade Kanaya and Rose good night and left the group early, trying not to think about why his… whatever it was with Karkat… seemed to be collapsing for no apparent reason.

~-~-~

Babies. Everywhere. That is the only way to describe the next few days. Babies and more babies. Some troll babies, some human babies, and at last… some human/troll hybrid babies. Calliope pointed out that they should have a species name, rather than calling them hybrids, so they all spent some time brainstorming. Besides the ridiculous suggestions, mostly coming from Dave and Dirk but a good number of them (significantly lamer) from Jane and John, none of the suggestions really thrilled anyone.

The troll/human babies were amazing. They had pinker skin than trolls but grayer than humans, and to Dave’s delight they did indeed seem to have little horn nubs on their skulls. They started with only four limbs, though, but their sexual organs seemed to be more aligned with troll anatomy. They had hard claw-like fingers and sharp teeth, but seemed to be social creatures, happiest when snuggled up with their fellow hybrids in little groups that Jade started calling litters.

There wasn’t much time to wonder over them, though, and reluctantly the next phase of the plan was put into motion. Transports were loaded with Carapacians and babies and sent on their way to new settlements, as many supplies in place as possible with what could be salvaged from the planets in Jade’s possession. Medical equipment, libraries, technology, shelter… Jade had been especially busy trying to get things in place. Roxy started helping by doing her best to create more supplies from void, and it was working best with the simplest things like bandages and diapers and building materials. Still, there was only so much that could be done, and the final transports were speeding off to inhabit old cities and new alike.

The Creators split up into crews to go to the new establishments and try to get some of the infrastructure up and running. Dirk, Roxy, and Dave were the most knowledgeable about the internet and mechanical components of the long-dead Earth cities and towns that were being reclaimed. John, Jade, and the others learned as much as they could before Jade teleported them to new cities to do their best. They would all meet back at the original site of the bonfire in a few weeks for the next step.

Meanwhile Kanaya, Rose, and Karkat worked on the Matriorb. They had found a good cave system near where most of the troll babies had been relocated, and now the goal was to hatch the Mother Grub and make sure she was growing healthily and had the proper care of the Carapacians who lived nearby.

A week into this endeavor, Kanaya came to the conclusion that she would have to stay for several months to make sure the Mother Grub was maturing properly.

“I should be here for the first slurry spawn,” Kanaya mused, looking worried. “It will take years for the troll clones to grow to sexual maturity, though.”

“Dave can take care of that,” Rose said soothingly. “We’ll make sure the Mother Grub is maturing well, and then he can take us twenty years down the timeline to take care of the first slurry batch.”

Kanaya and Rose went into town to talk to some of the Carapacian leaders nearby who had promised to take care of the Mother Grub in Kanaya’s absence, so that she could let them know when to expect her. Karkat thought he heard her murmuring to Rose as they left about regular check-ins for the first three or four generations, so that the new trolls were not entirely without the leadership of the last of their species.

He sat with the Matriorb, now settled into its cave and pulsing slightly and giving off the faintest glow. Under Kanaya’s care, the orb thrived. He watched it, fascinated by the pure white light it emanated, that simultaneously seemed to be every color despite having no color at all. With a new Mother Grub, the species could be anything. Maybe the hemospectrum would no longer dictate how long a troll lived. Maybe these new trolls would grow up as social creatures, raised by loving Carapacian families instead of solitary with just a lusus and internet friends for companionship.

Maybe nothing. He felt a new and burning direction. This was his task, his goal, his very meaning in life. He would make sure these new trolls, spawned from this pulsating, beautiful, horned orb before him—they would be better than the society that had raised him to feel worthless because of his blood color, worthless because he _cared_ about others. He thought of Dave and, despite still being wildly uncertain of their future, he nevertheless felt his insides squirm with affection and fondness at the thought of the pale-haired human. Loving Dave had taught him so much about what can be true of a troll, and if these new trolls were to exist on the same planet as the new humans and the Carapacians—and even the consorts, weird and disturbing as those things may be—then they would need to know of their history, and their potential.

He flicked through his sylladex, removed his husktop, and began to write.

~-~-~

Jade left Karkat behind reluctantly when she came for them. Rose and Kanaya backed him up, and when Rose said that Karkat’s writing endeavor was critical for the development of Earth C society, well. Far be it for a Witch of Space to argue with a Seer of Light about futures and destinies. Space and Time powers may have been fundamental to the operation of this huge undertaking, but without Rose’s Light abilities they would never have been able to discern the best course of action. So, reluctantly, Jade teleported away, promising Karkat she would see him again soon.

Karkat settled in to his shelter that he had built along with the girls, that would be his home for the next year or so while he worked. It would be lonely, a bit, but Kanaya had promised to stop in every few months to check on the orb and make sure Karkat was okay. He wanted to write his book well, to really dedicate himself and his thoughts to it, and for that, he needed time and focus.

Not even an hour since Jade had left with Rose and Kanaya, he heard the telltale *pop* from outside the cave entrance that she was back. Rolling his eyes, he yelled, “Jade, for _fuck’s sake,_ I told you I don’t need—”

He cut off when he rounded the corner and found himself facing not Jade but Dave, whose face was pinched with a kind of controlled fury that Karkat had never seen there before. Jade was nowhere to be seen, having teleported herself away immediately—or at least, Karkat assumed she had, because if he had been her and had seen Dave looking like this, he would have done so. Dave always tried so hard to be cool, impassive, expressionless. Karkat supposed that this stone cold, impossibly hard expression was a result of his attempt to be stoic now despite what was clearly an enormous anger. The result was surprisingly terrifying, though Karkat had never thought he would ever find Dave scary.

“Dave?” he prompted nervously, suddenly wishing he had a weapon and then hating himself for even thinking that. Well, it had only been a few weeks since the final battle. Some of his instincts after sweeps and sweeps in the game hadn’t worn off, so what.

“Were you planning on telling me that you’d decided to stay here?” Dave asked, voice icy.

Karkat’s stomach plummeted. Of course he had thought about telling Dave, but with everything that had been happening, and them having barely spoken for weeks while they took care of infrastructure and Matriorb problems…. Well, he had thought maybe he could spare himself some of the pain of the inevitable by avoiding this conversation. He had even thought that Dave would prefer it. Having to actually break up, especially when their relationship had never really been tested or defined… that was way more emotional trauma than their fling had been worth, right?

Karkat felt his old defense mechanisms flaring to life and heard himself say, “Oh, I’m sorry, are you my fucking lusus now? Do I need to run all of my decisions by you? Should I have grubsauce with my dinner tonight, Strider, or go without to try to maintain my slim figure?”

Dave’s control over his anger slipped enough that he frowned, his eyebrows twitching downward. His arms remained relaxed by his side but Karkat saw the tension in his body, like a tripwire pulled tight and ready to spring its deadly trap. “This isn’t a fucking joke, Karkat!” he snapped.

“Do I look like I’m joking?” Karkat shot back, arms crossing. “I’ve got to do this for the good of the species, Dave, so fuck me, right? I finally get my chance to do something great for this world, instead of the usual bullshit where I fuck things up. Rose even fucking _saw_ me doing this. Finally I’ll get to be more than the asshole who let his whole fucking team die, and when that time comes, here you are, mad that I want to do this for myself, like I’m fucking stealing your damn heroic thunder. Well, newsflash, bulgemunch, I don’t need your help and I don’t need your permission. You don’t get to monopolize the heroics, anymore.”

The anger on his face slipped, but fuck if Karkat could tell what this new expression was behind those _fucking_ shades.

“Is that… is that what you think is going on here?” Dave asked, sounding hurt.

Karkat refused to let the stricken tone of Dave’s voice distract him, he would not cave on this, would not let Dave pull him into his orbit and away from this task that was the most important thing he had ever done. “I’ve been the helpless lovesick sot in your shadow long enough, Dave. But I’m tired of always feeling like the lesser one between us, having to sit by as you pull me along in your wake.”

Dave tensed, raising his hands as if to gesture before letting them fall, then raising one again and running it through his hair. He opened his mouth. He closed it. He opened it again and only managed to choke out, “ _Fuck_.”

Okay, that was definitely not the response Karkat had expected. The depth of the hurt in Dave’s voice cut through the bullshit and suddenly he felt terrible, even if his fears about his relationship with Dave weren’t resolved. It was true: Dave may never have noticed it, but Karkat had always felt a bit like his… plus one. And Karkat wanted to be important, wanted to make a difference, and all he had managed was for Kanaya to knock him over the head to keep him out of the fight with the Condesce and Dave had decapitated his own fucking _brother_ and goddamn if he didn’t feel useless and like he was a consolation prize for this time-traveling shit eater.

But it fucking broke his heart to hear Dave’s voice choked up like that.

“Dave, I—”

“Nah, bro, I think you’ve made it abundantly clear how you feel and where you stand. Sorry I fucking cared, I guess? Fuck. When Jade showed up without you, I thought maybe something was wrong, or maybe she was just bringing you later, and then Rose told me you’re not coming and I thought—I thought….” He trailed off. 

Karkat took a step toward him but Dave immediately stepped back, wary.

“Dude, _no_. Don’t fucking touch me, don’t even come close to me. You think I came here to fucking save you, or because I can’t stand sharing the limelight and wanted you to be my docile little pet troll? Man, _fuck you_. I came here ready to beg you on my knees to let me stay with you, and _Striders don’t beg._ I just… I just wanted you to want me again, I guess.”

Karkat felt the words rip into him and wondered if maybe this is what it would feel like if Dirk ever used his Destroyer of Souls power on him. He wanted to say everything but no words came out. He wanted to hug Dave, hold him close and never let go, but he was rooted to his spot, the words “don’t fucking touch me” echoing around his skull like the dying screams of a person falling into a canyon.

Dave started to turn away but then stopped, looking back. “You know what sucks the most? All that time on the meteor, and I was finally starting to believe it, you know? Finally starting to think you actually cared, and that maybe I wasn’t broken, maybe I didn’t ruin everything. Between you and Rose, I feel like I actually kind of built some cool relationships? Like, I was learning about having people who actually fucking cared about me, and how to relate to them. But, apparently I was actually just ruining this all along too, because somehow you came out of it thinking I only liked having you around because it made me seem powerful or that I could play hero or something? I don’t even know how you could…. I can’t believe I fucked it up that bad.”

“You’re always in control,” Karkat said helplessly, and it came out almost like a plea. He would have hated himself for it if he weren’t so desperate to try to set this right, even just bring them back from the edge of falling into some dark and unknown crevasse. “You never needed me like I needed you.”

Dave gaped, then rubbed his hand to his forehead like he had a headache. Then the shades came off as he rubbed at his eyes. “I… I always needed you, asshole. I just… I fucking don’t know how else to show it. I kind of figured that crawling into your bed and pouring my goddamn soul out to you was enough. I… don’t even know what else to do. And I’m not trying to get out of this, like I’m sure I royally fucked that up. But I grew up thinking that showing… vulnerability, or… or looking like I wasn’t fully in control of myself—man, that shit got my ass beat on a regular basis. When I was really fucking little. I am learning more and more how fucked up that shit was, and I’m trying to learn how to be better from watching Rose, but I still…. Shit. Why didn't you just _tell_ me?”

Karkat took another step and this time Dave didn’t step away or tell him to leave him alone. He did tense up, though, watching the troll stiffly. Without the shades, the flash of fear on his face as Karkat advances is evident, as is the panic the red-eyed human must have been feeling at having been so vulnerable, and not knowing what will happen as a result.

Karkat raised his hand slowly, just enough to hold it close to Dave, palm up and inviting. “Dave. I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry.”

Dave hesitated, then put his own hand into Karkat’s, and looked at his feet. “I’m sorry, too.”

“Can we… can we talk about this some more?” Karkat asked, hopeful. “I was wrong about what I said about you, but I _do_ want to stay and finish this book.”

“I know,” Dave said, looking up at last and fuck Karkat loved those red eyes. “I want you to write it. I was never going to ask you not to. I just… wish you had trusted me.”

Now it was Karkat’s turn to look away. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, unsure what else to do. He hated himself so much right now. All that worrying and convincing himself that Dave didn’t really want him, and look where it had gotten him, when what had been getting in the way was his own insecurities. “I don’t want to lose you,” he whispered.

“Karkat,” Dave prompted quietly, taking his other hand and squeezing both. Karkat looked back at him. “Not only do I not want to do this whole Earth C thing without you, I don’t think I can do it without you. Okay? If you want me to stay, then I’m staying, because this whole thing that we’re doing is way too fucking much to take on _together_ , never mind alone.”

“Okay,” Karkat whispered, glancing down again as he felt himself tear up.

After a couple seconds, Dave tugged him forward and wrapped his arms around Karkat’s shoulders. Karkat slid his around Dave’s waist and nestled his face into his neck.

“Dude,” Dave said, turning his face to Karkat’s to kiss his cheek. “This is so gay.”

Karkat huffed a little laugh into Dave’s shoulder. “Why the fuck do I even like you,” he complained quietly.

~-~-~


	2. Changes [Part One]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be just one chapter, and then it got really long, so part 2 is coming shortly.

_“Dude, listen to me,” Dave says, rolling his eyes at Dirk. “You have to wear the godtier getup for me. It’s essential.”_

_“How can it possibly be essential,” Dirk grumbles, staring at the asshole pants that he hasn’t worn in… what… ten years? Though, to be honest, he kinda wants to wear them again, so he doesn’t protest further before stripping off his jeans and pulling the asshole shorts on._

_“Because I was a skittish little motherfucker back then,” Dave answers, holding out Dirk’s godtier cape for his brother to put on. “I’ll need the help remembering not to kill you, and this super gay purple heart is gonna save your life.” He grabs his brother’s shoulder and with almost no effort at all, rewinds time around them and years and years of progress and change are just, gone._

~-~-~

The day after he had confronted Karkat at the cave, Dave began time-sherpherding everyone around. At first everyone had wanted to just go in one big batch to the future, but between the various groups it quickly became evident that Dave would be doing a lot of jumping around with different people. He worked out a schedule for each person, insisting everyone keep their requests as simple as possible because Jegus this was going to be annoying.

A few people did not need to stay behind. Jane, Jake, John, Terezi, and Dad Egbert/Crocker were done with their tasks, so Dave jumped them all the way forward first. It was a shocking change to see even as briefly as he did, but he didn’t stay long enough to get pulled into the shenanigans. From this first crew’s perspective, the others would only be a few minutes behind them.

Back to the camp. Together with Jade, he spent the next month or two jumping Roxy and Dirk from city to city, troubleshooting the worst of the technology problems and training up some of the new locals. Then it was Kanaya and Rose, popping in and out of the Mother Grub cave twice a month for six months, sometimes staying for a day or two, but usually just for a few hours while Kanaya cared for the Mother Grub and Rose checked in on Karkat. Dave always stayed pointedly out of the way to maintain a stable time loop for later. Sometimes he thought maybe he heard someone else’s voice in the cave but nope, he wasn’t even curious, not Dave Strider. The last thing he wanted was an accidental dead Dave because he couldn’t camp by himself for a few days under the stars at most.

Finally, everyone but Karkat was safely in the future. Dave shifted himself back in time to the day after he had begun all this time traveling for everyone else, and spent the rest of the day and the next day flying himself to the Mother Grub cave.

Finally, he staggered into the cave and settled down next to a sleepy Karkat, for whom it had only been a week or so since Dave had first shown up at the cave.

“I’m never time traveling again,” he mumbled, arm over his eyes. Karkat snuggled against his side, and they slept.

He awoke sometime the next day (twelve minutes, 44 seconds past eleven o’clock AM, by Earth A time measurements—shit would the new societies in the future still use a 24-hour day?). Getting up and stretching, the first thing he noticed was the absence of Karkat. Apparently the troll had things to attend to outside of the cave today and had run out of patience waiting for Dave to wake up.

Dave stumbled out and found the latrine some distance from the cave and relieved himself. After washing his hands (you better believe he had learned to captchalogue plenty of soap and water in his sylladex after the first night he had spent waiting for Kanaya and Rose outside the cave), he started back to the cave. Maybe he’d sleep more. Or eat? Hmm what food would Karks have around—

A glimpse of someone tall—taller than Dave—and blond and wearing some kind of red clothes disappearing around the corner into the cave made Dave quicken his pace. Who was here? He had been so careful not to be seen while he had been helping Kanaya and Rose, there was no way that was him; besides, dude had been at least six feet tall and Dave was getting there but still had a few inches to go before he’d hit that benchmark.

When he finally got into the cave, his breath caught tight in his throat and his sword was in his hand in an instant. How the _fuck_ was _he_ here, he couldn’t be here, he was _dead_ —oh.

“Dirk?” he asked, hesitatingly. Leaning against the wall and looking down at the Mother Grub, newly hatched and still soft around the edges, like she wasn’t quite fully material, the Prince of Heart was wearing his asshole pants and square-shouldered cape, complete with the silly little tiara-like inside to his hood. If he hadn’t been wearing that get-up, shit. Because this Dirk was easily in his mid-thirties, not the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old version he had dropped off in the future a while ago.

Dirk looked up from the Mother Grub just as Dave’s sword disappeared back to paradox space or wherever his sylladex stored shit. To Dave’s surprise, an easy grin spread over his face at the sight of Dave standing there with his hair still tousled from sleep. It was jarring to see Bro’s face with that relaxed, openly amused expression. Hell, it was jarring to see _Dirk’s_ face that way. Their few conversations so far had led Dave to believe that, even more than Dave himself, Dirk tended toward asshole-Strider-stoicism.

“Hey, man, look at you,” Dirk said. “Fucking hilarious that you used to be so short.”

“Uh,” Dave said.

“And so skinny,” Dirk added. “Not like you’re beefy in my time, but.” He sighed, and his amused expression disappeared behind that asshole-Strider-stoic mask. Dave actually relaxed a bit more at this point because laughing Dirk was just way too weird. “Probably I shouldn’t even say shit like that. You—future you—would kill me. Okay, listen up.”

“Wait, what? What’s going on? Your time?”

“Yeah, just wait, you’re gonna love it. But bro, listen, I have some important things to tell you and I have to be gone before everyone else gets back.”

Dave groaned. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he asked.

Dirk said nothing, waiting for him to clarify.

“Me, from your time. I’ve gotta be, no other way your giant ass would have made it back to this time.” He looked around, trying to catch a glimpse of his future self, but even at sixteen he was pretty adept at not being seen by past Daves, which he supposed he now was.

“Stable—” Dirk began, but Dave cut him off.

“—time loop, yeah, I know. Okay so what’s so important that you had to come back all this time?”

Dirk handed him an Alternian version of a flash drive. “It was hard to get hold of that,” he said. “Technology developed around Earth B’s shit on this Earth, so Roxy had to—well, you’ll find out.” He sighed. “I’m really not good at this timeline preservation stuff. Okay, the basics. The need-to-know. Karkat has to put that in his book at the end, and he can’t read it. I don’t think you should, either, or anyone who goes forward with you. Went forward? Are we all—” he stopped himself, shaking his head. “Doesn’t matter. Basically, don’t let Rose or Kanaya read it either. Don’t let any of them know anything about this visit, or the manuscript.”

“What is it?”

Dirk narrowed his eyes a little, thoughtful, and looked back down at the Mother Grub. He squatted down to regard her again. “Karkat, well, he needs a few years on him before he can really write the second half of the book,” he said vaguely, reaching a hand toward the Mother Grub but not touching her.

Dave pondered this, looking at the memory stick in his hands.

“Anyway, make sure he includes it but doesn’t read it, okay?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

Dirk shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

Yep, still Dirk.

Except then he cracked a little smile at Dave’s eye-roll.

“Enjoy your year off. When you next see my pathetic emo self, tell him it’s okay to, you know, smile sometimes.”

“You won’t believe me,” Dave pointed out.

“Yeah, I know.”

Dirk turned to leave and Dave watched him go, then hovered to float behind him, hoping to be silent enough to catch a glimpse of future Dave.

Around the corner, outside the mouth of the cave, Dave saw just a flash of purple and red, and maybe, maybe a middle finger from a tall, broad-shouldered man with a long red cape.

~-~-~

It took a lot of stubbornness and asserting of his Knight of Time identity to get Karkat to agree to not read the file. At the point where Karkat started to question more details about how they got the data and who it was from, Dave used more nefarious tactics to distract Karkat away from his inquiries. Nefarious tactics like climbing into his lap and encouraging him to focus on much more important matters than future Dave’s message (Dirk was not mentioned), like Dave’s affection-starved present self.

Karkat was stubborn, too, but affection-starved Dave was very convincing.

Things were going his way, too, until he heard clicking footsteps from the mouth of the cave, and Rose’s cool voice “—it’s fine, Kanaya, he’ll wait as long as he needs to.”

Dave reluctantly climbed off of Karkat’s lap, but not in a rush. Kanaya and Rose knew perfectly well why Dave was staying with Karkat, unlike John and Jade and some of the others. 

“Hello, boys,” Rose said as she rounded the corner, Kanaya a step behind her. “Need a minute?”

“As if you didn’t already know exactly what you were interrupting,” Karkat muttered.

Kanaya headed straight to the Mother Grub, cooing over it and ignoring the others as she tended to her precious charge. Rose smiled at Karkat, but as she opened her mouth to reply her attention was caught by the memory stick that had been forgotten just a few moments ago.

“What is that?” she asked, her smile gone. She looked concerned.

“Nothing,” Dave said quickly, while Karkat said at the same time, “Some message from the future.”

Rose raised an eyebrow at them, then looked back to the memory stick. Her eyes had taken on that vague glow that everyone on the meteor had learned to associate with her Light abilities. “Hmm,” she said. “I suspect… yes. Karkat, it would be best if you listened carefully to my brother’s instructions regarding this item. 

“How do you even know he’s given me instructions—no, don’t tell me, of course I know already, fuck off.” He snatched up the memory stick and handed it to Dave. “Command me, Knight,” he said sarcastically with a spiteful little bow, “and I shall make it so.”

“Ah, bro, no, that’s so not cool, I’ve been trying to tell you for like hours that you have to listen to me about this. Why do you just believe Rose as soon as she says it once?”

Karkat scoffed, complete with raising his eyes to the heavens. “Seer of Light, Dave.”

“Knight of Time, Dave!” Dave protested.

Rose and Karkat both gave him flat looks and he stuffed the memory stick down into a pocket, grumbling about how he is a Time god, of course his word should be trusted about Time, some people’s friends, man, it’s like you get no respect around here for fucking saving everyone’s ass….

“What’s that, Dave?” Rose asked sweetly even as she walked away to see what Kanaya was up to. “Nobody can hear you.”

~-~-~

It did in fact take almost a year for Karkat to finish his manuscript. After a few months, he and Dave took up residence in the Carapacian town nearby, since the Mother Grub had grown larger and Kanaya had strongly hinted that continuing to reside in her cave might not be very pleasant. Karkat had told her to come look for them in the village if they weren’t still in the cave the next time she visited.

“Oh,” she said, frowning and glancing at Rose. “Actually, I think this is the last time we’re going to stop by.” She looked back at Dave, raised an eyebrow.

He checked his internal clock and tried to remember when the last time he had brought Rose and Kanaya to the cave was. “Oh, yeah,” he agreed tentatively. “I mean, I think so? If you think so, then….”

So when Rose and Kanaya left that night, they gave hugs and promises to see each other soon. For the girls, it would be very, very soon. Dave would be time traveling them to the same point in time as he and Karkat would later go, so that all of the Creators would be starting their future lives together. He and Karkat would just be a year older than the others.

Dave, of course, made friends with the Carapacians quickly and the rest of the year he spent working with the local leadership on designs for aqueducts. Jade had brought a library which contained some college-level engineering and math books, so Dave dug in and tried to teach himself some basics. He wasn’t as good as Dirk at the tinkering stuff, but he was starting to really get the hang of some of the theories and the physics by the time Karkat was finishing his manuscript.

Both of them had accepted new clothing from the Carapacians, so Dave had finally retired his godtier pajamas. Every now and again he would try them on and they always fit perfectly. He had also grown another inch or two and suspected that if measured, he’d come in at a good five foot ten inches by now. Hell yeah he was gonna be as tall as Dirk when they got back to the future.

He was in the middle of arguing with a Dersite lady about whether or not their model would scale up properly when Karkat approached with a look that fell in that confusing spot between smug and drained.

“What’s up?” Dave asked, switching his attention to Karkat with a little frown.

“It’s done, I think,” Karkat said.

“What, really? Wow, okay.”

Karkat snorted but wasn’t really mad that this was his reaction, because yeah, that’s kinda how he felt about it, too. The Carapacian lady snatched the designs and went to direct some of the mechanics and laborers under her supervision to carry on despite Dave’s concerns about scaling. His attention was torn between this development and Karkat for a moment, before he sighed. “Whatever, they’ll figure it out soon enough.”

Dave followed Karkat back to the little can house they had adopted as their own. It had two stories: on the first floor was a living room that led directly into a kitchen and had a bathroom attached, and on the second was a bedroom. Their bedroom. Dave still got weird stomach feels when he thought about it being their bedroom. And weirder head feels when he thought about the fact that he and Karkat were basically kids. He _liked_ living with Karkat, and he figured their lives hadn’t really taken the normal course of teenagers—or whatever trolls called pre-adult people—but…. All of his cultural knowledge from his home Earth had taught him to believe someone his age wasn’t grown up enough to cohabit with a lover.

Lover. Huh. What a word.

Oh well, if they had separate houses or bedrooms, Dave would probably just end up always spending the night with Karkat anyway.

Besides, it’s not like it had all been peaches and cream. Neither Dave nor Karkat had made it out of the game unscathed, and between the two of them nightmares happened almost nightly. Panic attacks once a week. That kind of shit. Dave didn’t like thinking about it, just knew that without Karkat he would not be doing even half as well as he was now, and vice versa was probably true, too. Honestly, it was not that different from their time on the meteor in that regard, anyway, so they just kept coping as best they could.

In their can house, Karkat showed him the manuscript. For having worked on it for almost a year, it wasn’t as long as Dave had anticipated. When he said this, Karkat immediately launched into an annoyed and expletive-laden rant about quality not quantity and the importance of editing, and it only got worse when Dave said something along the lines of how much he resembled Kankri.

Still, Dave spent the rest of the day reading, and the next day, too, and at the end of it, he was impressed. And surprised. “You didn’t read the—”

“Of course not,” Karkat replied, remarkably calm, as if he had anticipated this question. And yeah, also because after their little blow up last year they had been actively working on healthier communication. Dave made himself actually say things about what he felt directly (it got easier each time) and Karkat tried to not _always_ call him names or chew him out for, well, anything.

“Then how—”

“Common sense, Dave,” Karkat muttered, grabbing the old and beat up husktop. “What else could need to go into this except advice on being an adult troll? That’s definitely something I can’t give solid advice on right now.”

Dave had also come to this conclusion, but with considerably more clues than Karkat had been given. Dirk had let quite a bit slip.

Dave climbed to the second level and fished around in his drawer (not going to be his much longer, he and Karkat were just days away from leaving now, he supposed) until he found the memory stick. He brought it back downstairs and sat next to Karkat on their couch. ( _Their_ couch. Fuck he was going to miss this place.)

Solemnly, he handed the memory stick to Karkat, who booted it up. Dave almost wished there would be some kind of error message because wouldn’t that just be _classic,_ all this consternation over the damn future text and it wouldn’t even load. But of course it did, because it was a stable time loop, and if the future had the manuscript then Karkat had to have it now.

Both of them felt the temptation to read it.

Dave snapped the husktop closed before they could. “You can’t read that until after you’ve written it. Like, when we’re thirty or some other shitty old age.”

Karkat raised an eyebrow. “Thirty, hm?” He did the mental math converting to sweeps as Dave cursed at himself for letting that detail slip out. “Well, surely I pupate into an adult long before then. Shouldn’t be that many sweeps… ugh, fine, _years_ now anyway.”

“Maybe it just takes you forever to write.”

They brainstormed reasons that this might be the case for a while before Karkat finally sighed and looked back at the still-closed computer. “Okay, I’m ready to put it all together. _Without_ reading it, I promise.”

Dave nodded and handed the husktop over. Soon enough the manuscript was done, parts one and two complete. Karkat stood up to take the computer to the printing center that he and Dave had months ago set up and made functional, but Dave grabbed his hand, stopping him short.

“Hm?”

“Let’s… let’s give it over tomorrow,” he said, tugging the hand. Karkat set the computer down and settled onto the couch next to Dave, who pulled him close into his arms, turning them both sideways so their legs were stretched along the length of the couch.

“What’s wrong?” Karkat asked, nestling in and sighing contentedly as Dave rested his chin on his shoulder so their cheeks were touching. Years ago on the meteor, Dave’s penchant for cuddling had taken Karkat by surprise. At the time, they had barely started figuring out what they were to each other—each hanging on to outdated and culturally bound meanings of desire and attraction that had no basis in a post-Sburb/Sgrub world—and Karkat had still thought of Dave as unlikely to do anything sincere whatsoever. So when Dave had first, a bit shyly, started requesting to cuddle up together, Karkat had kept waiting for the ironic and cool bullshit about it. But nope. Dave was a downright cuddle fiend, sincerely and with no apologies.

Karkat loved it, even if he did tease Dave from time to time about it. Because it was adorable to see him deny it. And now sometimes he called Dave cuttlefish and he only wished that Feferi were around to appreciate the height of comedy that was such a fish pun.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Dave said. A long moment passed. “Are you going to miss it here?”

Karkat turned his head up and back so that he was squinting up at Dave’s face. He reached up and pulled of Dave’s shades. “I guess,” he said, now that he could see the kind of sad and nervous look in Dave’s red eyes. Fuck but those eyes still got to him. “But I’m excited to see everyone, and to see how all the different groups are doing, whether the book is important….”

“Yeah,” Dave agreed, settling back a bit, which made Karkat have to readjust. “I do miss everyone. It’ll be cool to get to see them all again. But for them it will have just been yesterday since I dropped them off. Oh—I’ll be a year older than Rose, she’ll hate that.”

“You’ve already been to the future,” Karkat pointed out after a moment.

“Hm? Oh, well, yeah, just kinda ferrying people back and forth.”

“But surely you saw some of it, have some idea of what we’re going to find.”

“Not much, man. I dropped people off and _skeddadled_ like a—”

Karkat reached up and covered Dave’s mouth with his hand. “No, no sir, I am way too relaxed to have to listen to one of your awful extended metaphors that makes no sense and slaughters any attempt to stay on track that might have graced its presence.”

Dave licked his hand.

“Yeah, as if that even fazes me anymore,” sneered Karkat, rolling his eyes.

~-~-~

The formatting of the book took some time to finish, but luckily one of the Prospitians who had taken up residence in this town had been a publisher on Prospit. Not that any of Prospit’s presses had been especially well regarded, nor Derse’s—like their newspapers, their books tended to be sensationalist and prone to fast-changing trends and popular mood. But she did know a thing or two about formatting and printing, so Karkat and Dave had been leaning on her help to make the print shop up and running.

The Prospitian named her shop _Prospit Press_ in homage to her previous life. It had taken some work to get the husktop to be compatible with file transfers, but luckily Roxy had spent some time trying to get everyone’s tech to work together in that month or so that she and Dirk spent trying to get the tech infrastructure off the ground, so they weren’t starting cold.

Between Dave and Karkat, they had managed to get everything transferred to the Prospitian’s computer. She worked hard all day on the formatting, and then again the next day, and on the morning of the day after that she woke Dave and Karkat up, pounding on their door, presenting them with two first edition copies. Karkat was careful not to flip through the second half of the book as he looked it over, emotion choking his throat.

He and Dave careful bound up their copies and stashed them at the bottom of the bags they had packed to take to the future. Most of their stuff they were going to leave behind, because there was no point in trying to take their whole house with them when they had no idea what would be waiting for them.

They said farewells, checked on the Mother Grub one more time, then Dave laced his fingers into Karkat’s, their backpacks of clothes and few mementos slung across their backs, and phased them into the future.

~-~-~

It took months for the hubbub around their return to calm down. They discovered separate kingdoms for the different species, though nothing was _too_ segregated. Mostly the separation seemed to have developed due to biological needs of each species. Humans found it most comfortable to live with other humans, who aged the same way they did, who mostly slept and woke at the same times, and who had similar daily needs in terms of food, schooling, etc. The same was true for trolls, and to a lesser extent, for the Carapacians and Consorts. Yet all of the kingdoms, and especially their major cities, blended the different societies quite nicely. The troll/human hybrids, who had (to Karkat’s relief) thrived despite their cautious beginnings, found happy homes in all of the kingdoms.

Eventually, people settled. Jane had business goals and took to the human kingdom, along with John, who seemed to just want to settle down and forget about the world for a while. Roxy and Calliope found the Carapacians _way too cute_ and after some time of bouncing between kingdoms, had settled to become queens in their new home. Their official role as rulers was fairly limited, but the Consorts had kept open the thrones for the entirety of their existence, waiting to have their heroes back faithfully. Meanwhile, Jake and Dirk had a home in the Consort kingdom, where things were simple and they could focus on building things, but mostly they floated from place to place, adventuring or wandering restlessly.

Terezi left to go back to the Medium to find Vriska. They hadn’t known this was possible but between her own powers and Rose’s, the Seers had managed to glean that the door to Earth C’s universe was still there, tucked away in a forgotten corner of the world. The Medium was collapsing outside, but this only made Terezi more convinced she had to go.

Kanaya wanted to spend more time assisting with new broods of wigglers. She and Karkat were awed by how different troll society seemed. Though some pockets and enclaves stuck to more traditional quadrant romances and anti-social behavior, the new troll society was largely structured around a semi-social way of life. This meant that small groups of trolls, similar to human families but called clusters, lived together or near to each other and raised wigglers to adulthood as part of the cluster. Within the cities, clusters tended to be very small, just two or three adult trolls. In more rural areas, clusters could be as big as fifteen or twenty adult trolls, living on multi-acre compounds that typically bordered other cluster compounds. The most removed areas often saw trolls without clusters, engaged in quadrants, living far from each other and contributing to the slurry if they so chose but not rearing children themselves.

Karkat loved the new troll society. There were echoes of quadrants in the clusters, but by and large the new society was loving, trusting, and kind. Some amount of snark and competition had lived through the transformation in developments like team brawls, the most popular sporting events of the Troll Kingdom; however, the hemospectrum was all but forgotten, and the different powers of the trolls seemed to have gentled into more pro-social forms.

Jade settled in with Karkat and Dave, and it was a comfortable arrangement. It kind of felt like their own little cluster, everyone caring for each other, nobody left out. In fact, Jade balanced the two of them out in new ways that surprised both Dave and Karkat—though they had enjoyed their living arrangement before, having Jade around boosted their spirits and added new dimensions to their lives. For one, Dave could not get enough of watching Jade confound Karkat with her easy-going nature, refusing to get seriously riled up about almost anything, while Karkat would devolve into increasingly more frustrated rants trying to convince her to be upset.

Things were great.

Until they weren’t.

It was Dave, really. 

A year and a half into this arrangement, he started having uncontrollable anxiety. Karkat was close to molting and transforming into adulthood, and his presence among other young adults was constantly sought—he was, after all, their very own prophet who had literally written what was more or less the holy book of troll society (which he still refused to read). Jade spent most of her time consulting with local schools as a guest speaker and teaching children about the outdoors, a job she excelled at. And Dave? Dave felt like he was back on the meteor, trapped in a small space, too few people around to have a thriving social life, more often than not alone with his thoughts.

But then, he also felt like he was back on Earth A, trapped in his home where it wasn’t safe. He knew logically that he could just leave whenever he wanted, that he could have taken a trip across town to visit Rose and Kanaya, or to one of the other kingdoms to see John, or Dirk, or _anyone_ whenever. He never did. He languished. He tried to create music, but nothing sounded right. He tried to take up photography, but he hated every picture he took. He also knew he was perfectly safe, but the more he withered, the more he felt that prickling at the back of his neck, like Bro was watching. More than once he opened the refrigerator only to jump back hastily and wait for the swords to fall out.

Once that started happening, everything he had hated about the game crashed back down on him. The feeling of being constantly about to die. He dreamed about dead Daves, and then dead Karkats and Jades and Johns and Roses and Roxys and Dirks. He dreamed about killing Dirk over and over. He dreamed about Dirk and Bro hazing him and laughing together about it. He dreamed about Jack and Derse, and LOHAC, and he swore he woke up smelling singed pajamas. 

He made the mistake of not talking about it, even when Karkat or Jade would tentatively ask if he was okay, what was bothering him.

It all came to a head one night when Karkat called him down for dinner.

He wasn’t hungry but he didn’t want to have to listen to Jade worrying over how little he had eaten recently, so he headed down the stairs and towards the kitchen. As he approached, he heard Jade and Karkat talking about their early days in their respective sessions, and Jade told Karkat about how she had been flying, trying to wake John up when he had almost died on Prospit.

And then Dave stumbled to a stop, because he was standing—what the fuck, was that his quest bed? He looked to his left and there was Rose, purple pajamas ruffled from flight, and before them was the Tumor, the Bomb, the thing that had spawned the green sun, and he was staring at his own mortality but it wasn’t his face like it usually was (all the _GODDAMN dead Daves_ ), it was Rose’s face, so open and scared and all of her usual, aloof sass was gone, it was just the two of them about to die, about to feel their bodies ripped apart as the bomb tore them and everything left in reality into shreds—

Blink.

It was Jade’s face, worried, mouth moving.

Blink.

It was Rose in Derse purple, eyes wide.

Blink.

It was Karkat, scared, maybe saying his name.

Blink.

It was the bomb but the bomb was Bro with a sword in hand.

Blink.

“Sh-shit,” Dave stammered, backing up from whatever it was that was in front of him. Someone touched his shoulder—Jack? Had he followed—no, it was Karkat—what was Karkat doing here—he had to escape.

He tore out of the house and took to the sky, flying as fast as he could in the direction of Rose and Kanaya’s hive. He was there before he knew it, barely aware of the time passing (though, when he landed, he thought about it and knew that he had never flown between their homes that fast before).

Rose was waiting for him. She was wearing something Kanaya had made for her, a beautiful, long red blouse over black leggings, and it was nothing like her Derse pajamas and the sight made him cry because here was his sister, alive and not even a little bit the same as the sister he had died with all those years ago.

She met him with her arms open and he sank into them, sobbing. Vaguely he heard her say something to Kanaya, but he didn’t care what, he was just so fucking relieved she was alive, and he was alive, and _fuck_ he had missed her.

When his tears stopped, he sat up and accepted a handkerchief, mumbling a soggy apology.

“Dave Strider,” she said seriously, “if you say anything about this being fucked up, I swear—”

He smiled despite himself, remembering his first awkward conversation with Dirk and the awkward hug at its end. “Promise I won’t,” he breathed.

They sat down together on the couch. “Shit,” he said. “Karkat is going to be so mad, I just left like a loser, didn’t tell him where I was going.”

“He called before you got here,” Rose said smoothly. “Jade apparently followed you for a bit so he was left by himself. You really did give him a scare.”

“Jade followed me?”

“She turned around when she realized where you were going,” Kanaya said from the doorway. She waved her phone toward him. “I’ve been in contact with them, they know you’re safe.”

Dave breathed out a heavy sigh. “Thanks, Kanaya.” His sister-in-law gave him a sad smile, and disappeared into the hive.

“Tell me, Dave,” Rose said after a long silence.

“What good is being a seer if you don’t already know,” he pointed out, looking anywhere but at his twin.

“Dave,” she said again, softly.

It worked. Words tumbled out of him. He told her everything he could. None of it made sense, it was all a jumbled mess of disjointed feelings and dreams and stories, and at the end of it even he didn’t know what he was talking about. Rose, however, saw the straight line out of the wandering and aborted threads, because… Rose.

She surprised him by saying, “Why don’t you go visit John for a while?”

He gaped at her. “Uh, what? Did you hear anything I just said?”

“Yes, genius brother of mine, I did in fact hear everything you just said.” Her cat, a three-legged black beast named Blanche, hopped into her lap, and she stroked her fur absently. “Don’t you want to go see John?”

“I mean, I guess so,” Dave answered, confused.

“Good. Because I happen to know he sees an excellent counselor.”

“What?”

“And I’m sure that if she can handle John being a ‘Creator’,” she paused on the word, her mouth turned down at the corners in distaste, “then she can do the same for you.”

Cue the drawn out explanations about how Dave did not in fact need to see a therapist, thank you very much, and the equally drawn out shut-downs of his self-shaming nonsense. Rose won, as she usually did, and they made a plan to go together in two days’ time to John’s house in the Human Kingdom.

~-~-~

Jade gave Karkat and Dave space to say goodbye before Rose arrived to join Dave for their flight to John’s house.

Karkat let Dave wrap him in his arms, but was quiet and withdrawn as Dave held him. Dave sighed and stepped back. “What’s going on, bro?”

What Karkat wanted to do was erupt into a defensive rant about Dave’s behavior, about feeling left out and hurt because Dave had sought Rose’s help, not his, about how angry he felt that Dave had not been honest with him for months now about how he was doing. But he bit his tongue, because he also knew that to some degree he had failed Dave, had not pressed when he needed to press, or had pressed when Dave couldn’t handle the pressure.

He hooked Dave’s shades off of his face, and when their eyes met, he felt the anger and hurt mellow into something more like… uncertainty. “I just… I’m worried that this is more than just goodbye for now,” he admitted nervously. “Like next time I see you, we won’t know each other. Or you won’t… want to be with me.”

“Dude, it’s counseling, not electro-conversion therapy,” Dave said drily, though he supposed the reference probably meant nothing to Karkat. Still, Karkat shot him a withering look and he relented. “Sorry. Listen. You remember how when we first got here, you thought I wouldn’t be interested in our relationship anymore?” Karkat nodded, looking away again, a bit uncomfortable. “And I told you—do you remember—that I couldn’t imagine doing this—” he gestured around himself as if to indicate the entire world “—without you?”

Karkat nodded again, still not meeting Dave’s eye.

Dave gently took his chin and tilted it up until the troll’s eyes flicked up to his own once more. Dave smiled. “That will never, ever change,” he promised. “I will always want to do this nonsense with you. I cannot stop wanting to do this nonsense with you. I just need… I need to get my shit under control, and I can’t do that here, right now. Please understand.”

Karkat, now almost a foot shorter than Dave, who had continued to shoot up to 6’2” in the last year (an inch under Dirk’s towering 6’3”, a fact Dave knew very well), curled his fingers into Dave’s t-shirt, then smoothed the material out again before his claws could do damage. “I’m trying to understand, Dave,” he said sincerely. “I think—I think I _do_. Because when we got here, I felt the same way, I think? I jumped at everything. Once I even thought I needed my sickles to protect myself from you.” Dave flinched back as if he had actually been physically hit. “No—no! Don’t—I mean, shit.” Karkat took a deep breath. “I said that because… I wanted to tell you how fucked up I was by the game, at the time, not because you were actually threatening.”

They stood there for a minute, Karkat’s hand flat on Dave’s chest, one of Dave’s resting on the troll’s hip.

Karkat sighed, now tracing the design on Dave’s shirt with one claw, gently. “And, I felt useless. Like I didn’t belong here at all. Like I was some kind of… decoration. And not even particularly pretty decoration at that.”

“I dunno,” Dave said, his other hand coming to rest on the back of Karkat’s neck, squeezing lightly. “I like what I see.”

“That’s not the fucking point, Dave, okay?” Karkat said, a little annoyed. He huffed out a deep breath. “What I mean is, I was pretty fucked up. And having the book to write really helped me, I guess, because instead of letting those feelings overwhelm me, it gave me a purpose and a direction. I felt useful again. And you… helped me. A lot.”

Another stretch of silence.

“I just want to help you, too, but I don’t know how to, especially since you’re leaving,” Karkat finished quietly.

Dave was silent for a minute, then he reached up and took Karkat’s hand, still doodling on his chest, and held it tightly against his heart. “Help me by trusting me,” he said. “Help me by letting me go and knowing that I’m not actually gone. Help me,” he continued, his voice dropping to a raw whisper, “by loving me.”

Karkat threw his arms around Dave’s waist and pressed himself into his chest. “You know I do, you fucker,” he muttered. Dave laughed a little, and then they were kissing and it was more tender and gentle than anything they had given each other lately, and it broke Karkat’s heart in the best way.

A knock. Rose. They pulled apart, eyes meeting with mutual expressions of worry and fear. Things were about to change.

~-~-~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love reading your comments! Super happy to get them, and kudos too! :D


	3. Changes [Part Two]

Counseling turned out to be great. After a few weeks, Dave took up his therapist’s suggestion to enroll in some college classes while he was staying in Harley City, and it was bizarrely awesome to have something to do every day on someone else’s schedule.

He enrolled in a photography class, an introductory physics class, and an introductory archaeology class. He liked the archaeology class the best, because once a week the class actually went out into the fields near the city and worked on an active excavation site, and it was one of his Alpha timeline alt’s shitty statues of liberty, and it was fucking sweet. Of course, it was more than a little awkward for everyone at first, that Dave Strider himself was just another student in their intro class in which they were excavating a Dave Strider relic. People—including the professor—didn’t seem to know how to handle having their God of Time sitting in the front row, doodling in his margins, sometimes asking questions or rambling an answer to a prompt and ending up in the middle of a three-sentence-too-long metaphor that had taken eight wrong turns.

The photography class was also pretty cool. He learned some things he hadn’t known about advanced equipment, and then had to spend a whole session debriefing about how he had almost had a breakdown in class as he had thought about how long he had spent alchemizing even a mediocre camera and film on the meteor just to pass the time. It had felt like the most important moment of his life when he had finally gotten a good photograph to develop back then. As the professor walked them through the basics of some kind of fancy lens and lighting settings, his hands had shaken too hard for him to even hold the lens without fear of breaking it.

The physics class made him miss the can town he and Karkat had lived in while Karkat had written the first half of his book. Most of the content was a review of what he had taught himself while helping the Carapacians develop an aqueduct system. He wondered if the ruins of the town could be found without disturbing the Mother Grub, and made a note to ask Kanaya.

He called Rose for help learning how to study for midterms, because John just laughed when Dave asked him how to do it. Right, like John had ever really studied anything besides some shitty Nic Cage movies. Then again, Bro had never enforced any kind of rules about schoolwork, and Dave had fumbled through homeschool materials on his own for a few years before Bro had even stopped providing him with that. Yeah. That was another therapy session dedicated to just one topic.

The night before his physics midterm, Jade called while he was running through flash cards with John. John had no idea what they meant, but that was fine because he just made sure Dave had the information correct before moving them on to the next one.

Dave declined the call, wanting to focus.

A series of texts and three more missed calls later, he finally answered. “Jade, yo, what the fuck—”

“It’s Karkat, you ass!” she yelled, sounding relieved that he had finally picked up but also scared and worried and upset. Dave was on his feet in an instant, fingers clenched around the phone so tightly his knuckles turned white.

“What about Karkat?” he asked, eyes flicking to John, who was now also standing and looking worried.

“He’s—he’s—I don’t know what to call it, he’s evolving.”

“Oh, shit,” Dave said, “you mean like, becoming an adult?”

“Yes!” 

He could hear the rising panic in her voice, and tried to quell his own. “Jade, listen to me,” he said as calmly as he could, already flying up the stairs to the bedroom he was staying in to frantically start throwing clothes and other things into his backpack. “Go to my bookshelf and find the copy of Karkat’s book, it’s still bound with string, you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yeah, I know,” she said, breathless. “I’m going. Why?”

“I haven’t read the end, I don’t know! But it should have information about this… transformation, maybe you can help. Karkat’s probably the only troll who didn’t read it before he hit this point. Shit! I wish we had thought of that.” Then, his time god instincts kicked in a bit. “Don’t tell him what it says, though. We have to maintain the time loop or we could kill me and Dirk.”

Jade made a sound and yelled something but Dave told her he had to go, that he’d be there as soon as he could, and hung up the phone.

Now that he was off the phone, adrenaline still pumping through his veins, Dave started to feel the panic. He should be there. How stupid he had been, leaving Karkat to go take some stupid classes and talk to a stupid shrink, right when they had known he was only months from pupation. Shit shit _shit_.

John appeared in the doorway just as Dave zipped up his backpack. He was wearing his godtier clothes and carried a backpack and, to Dave’s surprise, Dave’s own godtier pajamas. “You should wear the godtier pajamas for the flight,” John said. “It’s way warmer than normal clothes.”

Dave nodded and didn’t even pause for a moment of modesty before stripping off his jeans and t-shirt, then pulled on the sweats, long-sleeve shirt, and hooded cape. The pajamas always seemed clean, to fit perfectly, and to be warmer or cooler depending on the weather. He hated them.

With the backpack on his shoulders, he turned to John. “You don’t have to come,” he said, knowing that was his bro’s intention.

John scoffed, then grinned. The grin did a bad job of masking how scared he was, though. “No way I’m missing this! Besides, Jade might need me.”

No more time for arguing. Dave and John quickly locked up the house—not that they worried, everyone knew this house belonged to a literal god—and started their flight. When they reached a high enough altitude, John grabbed Dave’s arm, yelled, “Hold on!” and phased them both into immaterial wind. Dave didn’t know that was possible, but they were still constantly unlocking new little tricks to their powers, and if he could take people with him 5,000 years into the future, why couldn’t John be able to make other people into wind?

When strong crosswinds hit, they had to rematerialize so John could try to adjust the directions. For a while they used the natural wind to propel them faster, giving John a break from the near-constant use of his power. But it didn’t matter, no matter how fast they went, Dave had realized some time ago that they would never get there soon enough to help.

That’s when a flash of green light ahead of them startled them both to metaphorically hit the brakes. They skidded to a halt just in time to avoid crashing into—Jade and Terezi?

“I’ll tell you later!” Jade hollered, then grabbed all of them and teleported them back to their hive in Troll Kingdom.

Inside, Karkat was lying, naked, on the floor of their shared bedroom, mostly motionless except for some minimal twitching of limbs, and his skin had a strange whitish sheen to it that Dave had never seen before. Dave felt his heart clench in his chest and reached out to touch Karkat’s face, but Jade yelled, “Don’t!” just in time to stop him. He looked up at her, shades long forgotten at John’s house, his face an open book of fear and worry.

“It’s okay,” Jade said, kneeling next to him and putting her arms around his waist. “He’s okay. He’s building a membrane—see? That’s what this white stuff is. But we don’t want to disturb it.”

“Can he—does he know I’m here?” Dave asked, voice shaky. He wanted him to know.

“I… don’t know, Dave, I’m sorry,” Jade said. “Try talking to him. He probably won’t respond but maybe he’ll hear you.”

“How long will this last?” he asked.

“A few days,” she said quietly. After a moment of silence in which Dave just stared at Karkat, she sighed and stood up. “I’ll make us some food.”

She didn’t wait for his response.

He started to talk to Karkat, told him stories about school and John and his therapist. Jade brought him soup and bread, and John joined them, and they ate a meal sitting together on Dave and Karkat’s bedroom floor, chatting. Rose and Kanaya showed up later, but Jade and John met them downstairs to give Dave some privacy. Before she left, Jade handed Dave his first edition copy of Karkat’s book, but it felt wrong to read it now after so much time abstaining.

He climbed into bed, right at the edge so he could see Karkat clearly, and fell asleep clenching the little tome to his chest.

~-~-~

Seven hours, eight minutes, and thirty-three seconds later, he woke up with a start. Karkat was now completely encased in a translucent white membrane which, Dave noted, was significantly bigger than his body. It covered most of the bedroom floor, and had even climbed up the bed a little. Dave had to very, very carefully withdraw a few fingers from the papery substance. He flew out of the room instead of walking in order to avoid disturbing the membrane any more.

Rose and Kanaya had stayed over, so John was busy in the kitchen making everyone pancakes when Dave joined them. While Egbert finished cooking, Dave pulled Jade aside and pressed the book back into her hands. “I can’t,” he said. “Timeline bullshit. But, can you just… tell me that he’s alright? That white stuff is like, _all_ over the floor up there and he’s completely covered.”

Jade smiled up at him, and his heart eased. “Yes! That’s how it should be, I think. Maybe Kanaya can tell us more.”

Kanaya still hadn’t pupated, but she _had_ read Karkat’s book, since her doing so would not affect the timeline, and she moreover both knew more adult trolls and was more knowledgeable about the troll lifecycle than probably any of the other Creators.

She confirmed the normalcy of the large white membrane, telling him that usually trolls prepared somewhere for this to happen instead of letting it grow all over in their house. But Karkat’s biology had always been a little strange, so perhaps he had had less warning than most trolls. She also told him that the membrane would stop growing after the first thirteen hours, which was now only an hour or two away, so the size of the membrane now was likely to not get much larger.

“Can he hear me, when I talk to him through that thing?” Dave asked, following her into the kitchen as John hollered for people to come and claim their breakfasts.

Kanaya smiled gently. “I think so, Dave.”

~-~-~

Dave took up his spot on the bed again, laying on his stomach so that his head was as close to the edge of the bed near Karkat’s head without disturbing the membrane. Jade joined him and he let her wrap him up in a blanket and hold him while he mumbled stories about his classes. She had him laughing with her commentary about the other students, and soon enough they had grabbed his computer and started making a song about the kid in his archaeology class who kept calling him “my lord.”

Rose tagged Jade out when she came in with a plate of lunch for both Dave and herself. Jade left to take a shower and said she was going to show John some sights in the city, since it was the first time he had ever come to visit.

The twins munched in silence on their sandwiches for a while, passing a bottle of apple juice back and forth between them. When Rose had finished, she wiped her mouth primly and asked, “So, how is therapy?”

Dave took another bite. “Awful,” he lied. Rose shoved his shoulder and waited. “Okay, it’s like, really fucking great actually. It’s great in the same way watching shitty movies with John is great. You sit there and hate yourself and everyone else for a while, but at the end you feel alright because John is just so fucking happy, the dork. Well, in the metaphor, it’s me who’s… happy, I guess. Happier? I dunno.” He sighed. “I’ve learned a lot, you know,” he said, raising an eyebrow at his sister. “I bet I could do better psychoanalyzing you these days than you doing me.”

Her eyebrow raised, too, mirroring his expression but with an element of mockery to it. “Interesting phrasing,” she mused. “Freud might suggest that you have implied an ongoing, lingering desire for the mother—”

He groaned and shoved a hand in her face. “Whoa, no, leave Freud and Foxy—I mean Mom—ROXY out of this.”

They chuckled together for a moment, then settled back. Rose asked about school, which made Dave realize he had never contacted his professors about missing class and, in the case of his physics class, his midterm. Jade, who had just popped in to tell them she and John were heading out, promised to take care of it for him if he would just text her the names of his professors. She could find their information online to contact them.

It was nice, to see and feel and watch his support system in action. John had dropped everything to help him get here faster. Everyone was cooking for him, keeping him company, reassuring him when he needed it. He still felt guilty about not having been here for Karkat when the transformation had started, but he could pretty much hear his therapist’s voice in his head pointing out the wasted energy he was putting into worrying about the past, how he deserved to take time for himself, blah blah blah, she was always right.

Underneath the membrane, Karkat seemed to be pulsing with red light. As soon as Dave noticed, he hollered for Kanaya, but she did not seem worried about it. It was a slow, asymmetrical pulse, taking almost half a minute to fully cycle from very dim to slightly-brighter-than-dim, then it would suddenly drop back to its least bright.

Dave watched for a while, memorizing the pulse, noting how incredibly regular it was. It lulled him to sleep, but not before he noticed that when it was at its brightest, he could see Karkat’s shape in silhouette underneath the membrane. But something about that shape seemed unfamiliar now, and it scared him.

~-~-~

Jade came and sat with him for a while the next day, and they watched the pulsing of Karkat’s cocoon thing in silence for a bit. Dave remembered after the silence stretched to ask what had happened with Terezi, and Jade explained that she had managed to get a message through to her in paradox space, and Terezi had used her Seer of Mind powers to find help Jade teleport directly to her, then back to where Dave was. It had been easy because all of them were so focused on Karkat. Terezi hadn’t been able to stay—she hadn’t had time to explain, but Jade suspected she had found Aradia and Sollux and the three of them were up to something.

Silence fell again.

“Did you get in touch with my professors okay?” Dave asked after a while.

“Oh! Yes, I sure did,” she said, giggling. “You should have seen their faces when—”

“Their _faces?!_ Jade, what did you do?”

She grinned. “I popped into their office hours, of course. I’ve always wanted to try going to office hours.”

Dave stared at her, impassive. “You popped in.”

“Yeah! It was fun! Besides, I wanted to stress the importance of why you were missing class. It’s one thing to send an email, but to have your friendly neighborhood Space Witch appear to tell you how your godly student is busy keeping vigil while his troll boyfriend pupates? Yeah, totally different effect.”

He was about to respond when they heard a knock on the front door downstairs. “That must be Dirk and Jake!” Jade exclaimed, bounding up and fly-leaping over the Karkat Cocoon. 

“Dirk and Jake are here?” Dave asked as he followed her out of the room.

“Of course! Roxy, Jane, and Calliope will be here later today, too!”

He didn’t have time to ask because they were already down the stairs and joining Rose at the door and then he was grabbed into a boisterous embrace by Jake, who stood several inches shorter than Dave but had a broader, more muscled frame. “Dave old boy! So good to see you!” he boomed, then dropped Dave back to his feet to catch John and Rose in one big hug.

Dirk reached out a fist and Dave bumped it casually with his own.

Dave was torn between wanting to sit upstairs and stare at Karkat’s pulsing cocoon or spend some time with everyone. Rose seemed to pick up on this and volunteered to sit upstairs, saying she wanted to read Karkat some of her latest book anyway—it was sure to piss him off. John and Jade ushered Jake out the door and into the woods near their house to show him where Jade would take the schoolchildren on outdoor adventures.

Dirk and Dave hauled out Dave’s laptop and immediately started digging into the latest installments of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. Dave hadn’t seen Dirk in, well, probably over eight months now, and his bro seemed… maybe a bit more relaxed? It was hard to tell with Dirk, which made Dave think of seeing him all that time ago in the Mother Grub’s cave, and how that Dirk had sent his younger self a message.

“Oh shit,” Dave said.

“What?”

“I forgot to tell you something, a while ago. And this message comes from a very credible source—the most credible source. But I can’t tell you who.” Dirk just nodded seriously, because when does Dirk not take things seriously? Dave fixed him with a deadpan expression and said, “You should smile more.”

Dirk blinked. “Uh, isn’t that problematic? Telling a hot babe to smile?”

Dave shrugged. “Maybe if I were trying to hit on you, which I’m not.”

His brother snorted a little to indicate his amusement. “Well… I’ll keep it in mind.” They looked up as Jade, John, and Jake came back into the house, all loud and with big _everything,_ gestures and shoves and just the space they took up.

Dirk watched Jake, and Dave watched Dirk, and when Dirk smiled while he watched Jake tackle Jade to the ground for a scrum, Dave saw.

Right about the time that the scrum crashed into the table and resulted in Jake having a big lump on his head and Dave having a table leg to fix, Roxy burst into the house without knocking. There was so much noise happening that Dave barely even registered her squealing about her favorite Striders as she pounced. Then it was a big pile of hugs and bodies as John decided it was a great time to get in on the hug action, and Jade wasn’t far behind.

When people finally listened to Dave hollering for them to move so he could breathe, and the dogpile disengaged, Jane and Calliope were there, and Kanaya and Rose had come in to see what the commotion was. Kanaya had been tending the meal that was underway for everyone, and soon enough they had scraped together enough plates and utensils and chairs to all sit around the dining room table and eat the hearty stew.

Dave listened to the bickering and ribbing, the intense conversations, the raucous laughter, and absorbed every stray bit of love he could, because this was his _family_ and he had forgotten just how good it felt to have them all around. Shit, he wished they lived closer together.

Jade saw his expression and squeezed his hand under the table, leaning in to bump her shoulder gently against his. He leaned his head down onto her shoulder and sighed, tired, content, and missing Karkat.

~-~-~

He woke up in his bed just after four in the morning, and he could only imagine that someone had asked Jake to fly him up to the bedroom or something. Maybe Jade had teleported him up the stairs. Either way, he had no memory of getting from the dinner table to the bed.

He sat up to look down at the Karkat Cocoon but instead found himself looking straight at—

Karkat.

“Shit,” Dave hissed, jumping backwards hard enough to crack his head on the wall.

Karkat blinked his now glowing red eyes and reached forward to check on Dave, but drew back when Dave flinched away again, eyes wide in the dark.

“Dave?” he whispered, and even without fully vocalizing his words, they both started at the change to his voice. It had lost its juvenile tininess.

“Dude,” Dave said, shaking a little. “Can you turn the light on?”

Karkat reached a long—a _really fucking long_ —arm and tugged the chain on their bedside lamp.

Dave blinked at the sudden flood of light, then his breath caught as he finally got a good look at Karkat.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, eyes wide.

Karkat was looking down at himself, his own eyes wide as he took in his changed body. His skin had darkened considerably, almost black now, and had long red lines running from torso to toes, hands to shoulders. He twisted to look at his back and Dave saw a red line running from under his hair down his spine. His claws looked… sharper, his horns were still nubby but maybe just a little bit bigger. And his eyes were red, like Dave’s.

When he unfolded and stood to walk to the mirror and see himself better, he towered over the bed. Dave had been around many adult trolls, by now; he knew perfectly well that they were generally taller than adult humans. It still made his breath catch to see how much height Karkat had gained in just a few days.

Karkat looked himself over with wide eyes, not caring that he had stepped on the husk of the membrane that his body had created.

“Fuck,” he said, and his voice was a low rumble where it had once been a tinny buzz. “Well, this is going to take getting used to.”

Dave stood up, trying to steady his trembling hands. Barefoot and facing each other, Karkat now had an inch on him. The same height as Dirk. Karkat saw him approach in the mirror and turned slowly to face him. For a minute they just gaped at each other, then Dave reached out a tentative hand and caressed Karkat’s black skin, which felt almost rubbery now. He traced one of the red lines from shoulder to hand, and Karkat shuddered at the feeling.

“How do you even grow bones this fast?” Dave said finally, unable to move past the fact that Karkat was now _taller_ than him, for the first time since they had known each other.

Karkat snorted. “Really?” he asked. “That’s the first thing you’re going to ask?”

“I mean, you grew like… a foot. And look at your wingspan, man. Hold your arms out.”

Karkat did as Dave bade. “Wow,” Dave breathed, reaching his own arms out and noting that Karkat’s span had easily five or six inches on his, despite their height difference being just the one inch.

“You know what this means, right?” Dave said, deadly serious.

Karkat flinched, and both men let their arms fall to their sides. “What?” He looked like he was expecting to be kicked.

“You’re gonna have to be big spoon _way_ more often.”

Karkat blinked in surprise, then threw back his head and laughed, and the sound was so different but still so very, very Karkat, and Dave loved it. Dave stepped forward and ran his hands up the sides of Karkat’s now-significantly-longer body, and he wanted to get to know every single inch of territory now available to him—

Thumping steps in the hallway, and the door burst open, and Jade threw herself at them, yelling Karkat’s name. Dave stepped back just in time for Karkat to have to catch her weight. She was babbling at him and he was laughing again and Dave could listen to that laugh forever.

“Oh my god,” Jade said, stepping back, looking him over. It occurred to Dave that she had possibly never seen Karkat naked before a second before this occurred to both of them, and he scrambled for a pair of his own jeans to throw at his boyfriend. Karkat stepped into them, but his waist was wider than Dave’s and he couldn’t really button them up, so Dave looked for a pair of sweats instead. When Karkat was comfortably in a pair of red sweats with the drawstrings tied, Dave looked him over.

“Please just wear them a little lower on your hips,” he said, biting his lower lip as he reached out to tug the pants down a bit.

“Oh my god,” Jade repeated, this time rolling her eyes. “Get a room.”

“We’re _in_ our room!” Dave pointed out as Karkat slapped his hands away and pulled his pants back up.

Jade didn't answer; she had already moved on. “We have to wake everyone up!”

“Wait, Jade!” Karkat yelled, but she was gone and they heard her knocking and shouting and light started flooding the hive.

Karkat looked back to Dave, pleading.

“Sorry, man,” Dave said with a laugh. “Tradition is tradition.” A pause. “But, come here—before they’re all up.”

Dave wrapped his arms around Karkat’s waist and tipped his chin up for a kiss, and it sent a thrill straight through his stomach and then a little further down to be the one who had to tilt _up_ for it. Karkat laughed against his mouth at the unfamiliar sensation of not having to stand on his toes to kiss Dave, and it was a strange but exciting second first kiss.

Someone wolf-whistled and they broke apart to see Roxy in the doorway, then Dirk and Rose and everyone else. Someone started cheering, and then everyone was cheering and Dave shoved Karkat into the hallway before anyone got the idea to intrude into their cocoon-messy room. Karkat was ushered downstairs and Dave grabbed him a t-shirt before going to join the festivities.

When a troll finished pupating, it was traditional for his cluster to throw a party. Usually the adults in his cluster would take turn keeping watch, and other adults would make sure to always have food ready when the end of the pupation period was approaching. This was mostly due to the fact that newly emerged adults were always ravenous, having just grown absurd amounts of bone and skin and muscle in a short period.

Indeed, Kanaya and John were scrambling to get things out of the fridge and heated up on the stove. Jade had made Karkat’s favorite homemade ice cream the night before and just as Dave stepped into the kitchen, she was pressing a bowl into Karkat’s hands, then grabbed a spoon from the drawer for him. Jane was cutting a cake, to John’s chagrin, while the stove fires clicked and caught to heat up stew and fry some fresh steaks.

“Dessert first, today!” Jade said as Karkat wolfed down the ice cream.

When the ice cream was gone, Dirk passed out champagne to everyone, while Roxy and Rose poured themselves some orange juice instead. A toast was raised, glasses drained. Someone yelled for a kiss, and Dave turned to Karkat, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. Karkat laughed, then said to Dirk, “I learned to be dramatic about this from you,” and swept Dave into a dip, cradling his head with one hand and his back with the other before planting a long kiss on his lips.

“Fuckin’ swoon,” Dirk said, just before the raucous cheering drowned him out.

~-~-~

Jane had to leave first, apologizing for the short stay, but business called. Getting surprise time off was not easy for a CEO, after all. Everyone else stayed a few extra days, but soon enough their hive was back to just the three of them. They settled in front of the TV, Dave smugly making Karkat take the corner seat on the couch so that he could be little spoon, his feet draped across Jade’s lap.

Jade pulled up the soap opera they had been watching together, and Dave noticed with a pang that they hadn’t watched a single episode without him since he had gone to Harley City to stay with John. As always, Jade and Karkat heckled the characters, then each other as they disagreed about whether or not Mrs. Ponty should have divorced Mr. Ponty to run away with Josey, the poolgirl.

When the episode ended, Dave asked Jade to wait before starting the next one.

“I’m going back to school next week,” he said after a minute. Karkat and Jade stared at him, and he took a deep breath. “I was really getting into it, and I want to finish the classes I was taking, and I’ve already missed a few exams and a bunch of class, so I need to start catching up—”

“I heard everything you told me about your classes,” Karkat said abruptly, cutting Dave off.

“You did?” Dave asked, twisting around in his boyfriend’s arms to see him better.

“Yeah. It was kind of like a dream—a real dream, not a game dream—like, everything was a bit fuzzy. But I knew the minute you were there, and that you stayed with me.” His arms tightened around Dave a little.

“Dave,” Jade said, and he turned his face back toward her. “What if I teleported you back and forth for classes?” Her eyes flicked up to Karkat a little nervously, making Dave think they had maybe talked about this without him before.

He sat up, shrugging off Karkat’s arms and swinging his legs back to the front of the couch. “You mean, every day?”

She tipped her head to the side. “Maybe? Or drop you off and pick you up at the beginning and end of each week? Karkat and I were thinking we could make you an office here so you could study.”

“You’d… do that for me?”

“Well, _duh!”_ she said, punching his shoulder. It smarted a little—Dave suspected she really didn’t know her own strength. “We miss you!”

“I miss y'all, too,” he said, grinning. “Hell yeah! Let’s figure out a schedule!”

~-~-~

That night, after making plans to convert the attic from storage to an office, Dave settled into bed next to Karkat, then rolled over on top of him so the length of his body ran along the length of Karkat’s. The troll “oofed” with the sudden weight of his boyfriend, who wiggled a little to get comfortable.

“I will never stop enjoying this,” Dave said, grinning. “This is the best thing ever. I didn’t even realize I wanted to be shorter than you until I was. It’s so awesome.” He hooked his foot around the outside of Karkat’s ankle, and ran his toes up and down the side of his calve.

Karkat rolled his eyes but before he could start some longwinded rant, Dave kissed him and for a minute they were content with the closeness.

Dave pulled back first, propping himself up on his hands to look down at Karkat. “Are you gonna write the rest of the book now?”

Karkat patted Dave’s hip pointedly, and Dave rolled off of him again, settling against his side. “I don’t think so,” he said, shifting so one arm was tucked under his head and the other one draped across his body with his hand hooked into the band of Dave’s boxers.

“Why not?” Dave asked, curling his fingers into Karkat’s dark hair.

Karkat’s eyes closed sleepily and he smiled as Dave rubbed the top of his head like he enjoyed. Dave was glad that hadn’t changed. “It’s too new right now. Besides, there’s no rush. You can just take it back whenever I finish it.”

Dave thought about Dirk and how he had looked at least ten years older than they were right now, and reckoned they had time to figure it out.

They had time to figure all of it out.

He fell asleep, happy.

~-~-~


	4. Interlude: A Journey, A Return, A Realization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This doesn't do much for plot, but is just an intermission of sorts that explores some of what Earth C might be like. I don't have much of an agenda with this "chapter" besides sharing some ideas about what our favorite kids and trolls might be up to, a good 18 years into their new lives.

Dave had flown ahead of their little group, wanting to scout a campsite. Jake, Dirk, and Roxy were taking their time, walking instead of flying, because not everyone who lived out this far from the cities knew that their flying gods were visiting, and they didn’t want to cause any trouble. The four of them were somewhere on the continent that had been called South America on Dave’s Earth, in a mountain range that had been named the Calliopes a few thousand years ago by the first settlement to expand this far south. Calliope herself had yet to visit them; she had declined the invitation to join their expedition in order to support Jane while she launched a major rebranding of Crockercorp.

What had piqued Jake’s interest in exploring this region was the fact that it was one of the only settlements to be founded and inhabited by exclusively troll/human hybrids, now called “scions” in homage to the fact that they existed only because the Creators had decided to make them. The scions of this settlement descended from the group that had arrived here over two thousand years ago, an adventurous crew who had wanted the opportunity to develop a culture of their own, rather than further inherit troll or human customs.

One side effect Dave and the other ‘Creators’ had not considered when deciding on a 5,000-year time gap between initiating new settlements on Earth and rejoining society, was the language change. Unlike on Earth A, when 5,000 years would have changed a language to be non-understandable from its origins, the English of Earth C changed far more slowly. Rose speculated that this was due to the fact that Earth C’s settlements began with internet access and data storage capabilities, which had slowed the evolution of language significantly. In fact, in Alterra Beta (or North America, as Dave still considered it), students were taught “Creator English” and “Modern English,” the first of which was solely for reading and writing formal texts, while the second was a more vernacular language. Rose had spent years learning Modern English in order to write well, and Kanaya and Karkat had also adjusted to the new language out of necessity, but the others relied on their godtier Gift of Gab abilities to navigate the changes.

The scions of this continent, which was now called Alterra Alpha, had developed a new language that sounded like a Modern English offshoot. Dirk was documenting some of the differences and had bought a good number of books for Rose, who had requested that they bring her back some of the local histories and bestselling fiction. 

Jake was less interested in linguistics and more in the mountainous terrains and how the local people had adjusted to high altitude living. Although there were many thriving metropolises in the lower altitudes to the east and west of the Calliopes, the high altitude settlements had grown up very differently from the bustling cities, and still maintained an almost exclusively scion population.

Dave paused in his flight as he saw telltale signs of one such settlement just a mile or two ahead of where Dirk, Roxy, and Jake were. The towns up here were not immediately obvious from the bird’s eye view until he had learned what to look for. Terraced agricultural slopes were the most obvious sign, but these were often camouflaged with cleverly placed trees and shrubs, which also served to provide shade to the crops in the very sunny heights of the mountains. Beyond the terraces, he noticed the changes to the natural slopes of the side of the mountains that indicated they had been formed into doorways and walkways just within the surfaces. Most of the scion settlements were carved into the sides of the mountains out here.

The scions of the Upper Settlements, or Upper Settlers as they were called by the city folk of Alterra Alpha, were shy and risk-averse. They had a tribal structure to their society, loosely based around kinship groups, which served as a means to negotiate land and population disputes between other groups. They were pacifists, as were most scions, and had no weapons besides those tools for agriculture and subsistence which could be used in a pinch. Dave suspected this was why they had learned to be stealthy about their settlements.

He climbed altitude as he started backtracking, ignoring his lungs’ protests at just how thin the air was getting, to try to spot Roxy and the others and get a better estimate on how far out they were from the settlement. They had learned the hard way that it was far better to not surprise the Upper Settlement scions by stumbling upon their terraced gardens and cave-like towns.

There—a flash of blue and yellow at approximately the point he had expected to find them. He estimated they were about an hour away from the settlement proper, which meant only half an hour from where they would first encounter inhabitants. The Upper Settlers had developed a kind of defense system based around early warning that involved well-hidden lookouts around the perimeter of the terraces. If the lookouts sounded an alarm, the rest of the tribe would disappear into the cave dwellings.

Dave started the plummeting descent to where he had seen Roxy and Jake, enjoying the feeling of adrenaline that always came as he watched the ground rise toward him at a sickening pace. He saw Jake float up above the trees, wave at him, then disappear back to where the others were presumably waiting, and corrected his course so that within minutes he was pulling up just above the tops of the thin trees.

“What do your elf eyes see?” Roxy asked as he touched back down to the ground. Jake snickered, and she held up her fist for a bump without looking. Dirk bumped.

“Okay, first of all, my elf eyes currently just see a bunch of losers who still think Lord of the Rings memes are funny. There has been over _five thousand_ years of pop culture to reference since then, and you go with Aragorn’s corniest line?”

“Five thousand years of _boring_ pop culture,” Roxy complained. “Earth C has nothing on Earth A.”

“How many times,” Dave sighed, long-suffering. “Your Earth was Earth B.”

“That doesn’t make sense, sonny,” Roxy countered as Jake groaned. This argument again. “We were the _Alpha_ session, we should be Earth A.”

“Look, that is like, one reason why you should be Earth A, and it isn’t even in the correct alphabet. There are so many reasons we should be Earth A, it makes yours look like one spec of sand on an infinite beach of sand crystals, but which are buried under mounds of dirt and then covered by grass. Wait, what’s that my elf eyes see? It’s an entire city built over those grassy knolls, full of reasons why we should be Earth A, and you should be Earth B.”

Roxy rolled her eyes. “Name one.”

“We came first,” Dave said, saying it slowly and with exaggerated, saccharine patience, like he was talking to a child.

“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” Dirk interjected, and Jake and Roxy busted out laughing while the Striders stared each other down.

Finally, Dave looked away, grumbling, “You’re not my dad,” but it was good-humored, the kind of joke that an outsider would suspect of being old and well-rehearsed among these friends.

“Okay, but seriously, old chap,” Jake prompted. “Did you see anything worthy of note?”

“ _Noteworthy_ , Jake. Noteworthy. Yes, I did. There’s an Upper Settlement about an hour from here, directly in the path of where we’re going.”

Roxy immediately flicked through her sylladex, then pulled out a box of supplies she had stored there early in their journey into the mountains. The others crowded around as they considered what was left in the box.

In it, they had collected everything they had among them or had picked up in town before their trip that functioned well as tokens of peaceful intentions. Jake had learned by talking (loudly) to locals when they had first arrived that if you were going into the mountains, you should bring gifts for the Upper Settlement tribes. People who came without gifts indicated either that they were not aware of the customs of the local groups, and therefore possibly a threat, or that they did not respect the local customs, and therefore _definitely_ a threat.

(Everyone else had been very impressed that Jake had managed to collect such useful information.)

The gifts didn’t have to be fancy. They had started their month-long mountain trek with the box full of seed packets, candles, batteries, durable bottles and jugs for storing water and oil, and things of that nature. Gifts that benefited the entire settlement tended to be better received, so those had gone quickly.

Roxy pulled a memory stick that was full of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movies. When Dirk had added it to the box a few days ago as they had searched their sylladexes for any gift-worthy items, Roxy and Jake had teased him mercilessly for carrying them around, but when Dirk had shrugged and taken it out of the supply box, Dave had insisted it had to remain. Never mind his rant about 5,000-year-old pop culture artifacts. SBAHJ was timeless.

Jake shook his head at the memory stick and they kept fishing around. At the bottom of the box was a pack of markers, which Dirk pulled out and everyone agreed upon. Gifts that benefited the children of the tribe had been a big success before. Roxy added a few strings of beads that could be taken apart and reconfigured into jewelry pieces by the crafters of the community.

“That should be good,” Dirk said with a nod, and Roxy put away the box of supplies while Dave carefully stashed the gifts into the backpack he wore. It was a small pack, as his sylladex did most of the work, but they had also learned early on that sylladexes scared people senseless on Earth C, so they tried to carry things more normally to avoid startling people by seemingly appearifying objects out of thin air. Of course, Roxy could do exactly that without a sylladex, but still.

Everyone kept their eyes peeled for the first sign of a lookout, and it was Jake who spotted the person sitting in the tree first. “Ahoy there!” he called, waving enthusiastically. “We mean you no harm, and come with gifts for your tribe!”

The lookout scampered down from the tree, more social than many they had encountered. Dave supposed this was because they were approaching more populated areas, so the scions here probably saw travelers more often than the ones in more remote areas.

Unsurprisingly, the lookout was a teenage scion. Scions of the Upper Settlements recognized no formal genders, though there were some themes among how different groups adorned themselves and acted. This teenager looked to belong to the group that others called wa-bees, a term Dirk had once speculated derived from the derogatory term “wannabe,” though Dave didn’t particularly think that their style of dress or mannerisms were related to what _he_ would have called a wannabe.

Wa-bees tended to have outlandish hairstyles, with lots of spikes and waves and tails, dyed many colors. Their clothing was usually handmade, loose, and colorful, and they liked jewelry and piercings. This wa-bee had zyr hair spiked in an orange and red spine down the center of zyr head. On either side of the spines, zyr horns curled up and back, similar to Aradia’s but thinner and more upright. The end of each horn was split in two naturally, and the length of each horn was adorned with silver rings and gemstones. Ze also sported piercings on zyr ears, nose, and eyebrows, as well as metallic bangles going halfway up zyr arms. Dave was impressed by how little noise ze made, considering the sheer amount of jangly bracelets. Dave was _more_ impressed, however, by zyr ridiculously cool shades.

“Welcome to the territory of Tribe Strider,” ze said, which made all four Creators start with surprise. Dave and Dirk exchanged astounded glances while Jake exclaimed “Well, darn my socks!” The scion was immediately on guard, unused to such a reaction from merely extending a welcome. “Have I offended you?” ze asked, taking a cautious step back.

“No, darling, not at all,” Roxy said coaxingly. “It’s just… well, the name of your tribe is… important to us.”

“Have you heard of Tribe Strider?” ze asked, eyebrows raised. “I thought lowlanders barely knew anything of our tribes, least of all our names.”

“It’s not that we’ve heard of your tribe, sport,” Jake said, running a hand through his overgrown hair pensively. “It’s just—well, these two fellows right here happen to share your last name.” He gestured toward Dirk and Dave.

The scion raised zyr eyebrows with shock. “Strider? Really?”

Dave nodded, grinning. “Dave Strider,” he said, extending a hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Dave Strider,” repeated the scion, shaking his hand despite zyr skeptical look. “Your parents named you after the Creator?”

“Kid,” Dave said, his grin widening, “parents name their kids after me. _Your tribe_ is named after me.”

“Hey,” Dirk said, a hint of offense in his tone.

“Nobody names their kid Dirk, Dirk,” Dave said.

“Someone might,” Dirk answered.

“I would!” Jake declared, slapping Dirk on the back.

“It doesn’t count when you’re _married_ ,” Dave said, rolling his eyes.

“We’re not married,” Dirk and Jake said in unison. Dave flapped his hand dismissively.

“Boys, boys,” Roxy chided, turning her attention back to the scion, whose eyes were wide as ze watched the exchange. “My name is Roxy,” she said cheerfully. “Roxy Lalonde. We brought these gifts for your tribe, if you’ll take them.” She glanced back at Dave meaningfully, and he stepped forward and presented the markers and strings of beads to the wa-bee.

Ze took them, but zyr attention was not on the gifts. “You’re actually… claiming to be the Creators? Dave Strider? Dirk Strider? Roxy Lalonde?”

“And Jake English!” Jake boomed, grinning like an idiot. He didn’t seem perturbed that the scion had not even made an attempt to guess his identity.

“Prove it,” ze said, eyes narrowing.

This had happened plenty of times before, though not yet with the people of the Upper Settlements. Unlike the others from the mountainous region they had met, this scion seemed outrageously forward and daring.

Dave and Jake took to the air, lazily looping about while Roxy popped a Perfectly Generic Object out of the void. Dirk just waited.

“Is that sufficient?” Dirk asked as Roxy handed the little green cube over to the scion, whose eyes couldn’t seem to dart fast enough between Jake and Dave who were now tussling in the air above them, and the cube, which ze took with a shaking hand.

“Y-yes,” stammered the wa-bee. “Thank you. I’m sorry! Oh god.” Ze looked truly miserable as the realization set in that ze had just questioned four of zyr gods on their identities.

“Don’t fret it for a minute, comrade!” hollered Jake as he touched back down next to Dirk, who leaned away from the obnoxiously loud declaration, face impassive. “Happens all the time!”

“Yeah,” Roxy concurred. “It’s not a problem. What is a problem is how flipping hungry I am!” She said this with a joking, gentle tone, not wanting to upset their new friend any further.

Her ploy worked, breaking the wa-bee’s horrified introspection. “Oh, of course!” ze said, shaking zyrself a little. “I’m sure the tribe would be happy to feed you in exchange for these gifts.” Ze was cradling the green cube like it was a priceless treasure, and Dave could already imagine how other Upper Settlers, and perhaps even lowlanders, would start taking pilgrimages to this tribe’s lands in order to stare in awe at the Perfectly Generic Object created by the hand of Roxy Lalonde herself.

Tribe Strider insisted that the Creators stay the night, and by the end of the day they had met the entire tribe except a handful who were off getting supplies from the nearest lowlander town. The lookout who had brought them in, whose name was Kye Lea, had taken them to zyr own blocks to rest and eat, then back to the tribal meeting center at the heart of the caves to meet everyone.

One tribe member, pregnant and glowing with satisfaction, had asked Dirk’s blessing to name zyr baby after him. The smirking was unbearable. Dave hoped the baby (wiggler? Wigby?) was an asshole like zyr namesake.

~-~-~

The next day they took the trail down the mountains and back to town, their trip to Alterra Alpha finally coming to a close. Dave kept an eye on his shades’ display for the first sign of being able to connect to the global network. He’d thought that after thousands of years of internet development, there would no longer be dead spots where he couldn’t connect. He’d thought wrong. The Calliopes had almost no service, so they had been out of touch with everyone at home for the last month.

When he did see the icon that indicated connection pop up in the corner of his field of vision, he grinned. “We’re connected,” he told Roxy, who whipped out her phone to text Calliope and see how Jane was doing. Dave floated up and away from the crew to call Karkat. An extendable camera detached from the side of the shades and rotated around so that the person on the other side of the video call could see more than just his eyes.

It was Jade who answered.

“Dave!” she squealed, delighted to see his face as her own overlaid into his field of vision.

“Hey babe,” he said, grinning. “We’re just coming down from the mountains.”

It looked like she was sitting in the living room of their hive. He could see a pile of mail next to her and guessed that she was sorting and filing the mess that had undoubtedly built up in his presence. People always guessed that Dave was the messy one, but without him, the hive fell apart. Despite the time he had spent apathetic to messes in his adolescence, one of the big changes he had made after seeing his therapist for the first time (was that really sixteen years ago?) was committing himself to a clean living space. He hadn’t even realized how much messy piles of crap reminded him of living with Bro until he had been halfway through a story about puppet ass and shitty swords and something had clicked. Jade and Karkat helped, but Dave drove the cleaning bus around their place.

“We can’t wait to see you!” she said. She held up a finger and he say a thick red string tied around it. “My reminder to pick you up tomorrow!”

“I have missed the Jade Teleportation Express,” he said. “We’ve been hiking, it’s awful.”

She rolled her eyes. “You _wanted_ to go on an excursion to the mountains, Dave. With _Jake_. I don’t know what you were expecting.”

“Okay, I was expecting to fly, because _we can fly_ ,” he pointed out. “How’s Karkat?”

“He’s out at that coffee bar he likes to write at,” she answered glancing toward the door. “Too much noise from the construction here for him to be able to concentrate. I think he said he’s only got a few more finishing touches on this last round of edits before he’s ready to send you back in time with the manuscript.”

“Wow,” Dave whistled. “That was fast compared to last time.” Neither he nor Jade suggested a reason for why this half of the book had only taken Karkat six months instead of the whole year the first one had taken. They knew well enough; the last sixteen years had been kind to Karkat, and Dave had no doubt that his partner’s healthier and happier life these days contributed. Especially since he spent less time second-guessing his writing and reworking every sentence in the fruitless pursuit of perfection.

“Yeah. Oh, Dave! I almost forgot!” Jade held up another finger and he saw a purple-and-green twisted thread tied there. “Rose and Kanaya have a date for bringing home Asa! It’s just another month away!”

Rose and Kanaya were adopting their third child. They were the only ones among the Creators who seemed interested in raising children. Their family so far consisted of a four-year-old human son named Luke, a two-year-old troll daughter named Albana, and they had begun the process to adopt a scion child named Asa Dalan several months ago. John had offered to use paradox cloning to make them genetic children, but they had declined. They, like everyone else who had made it through the game somehow, were used to making kinship out of bonds besides blood; besides, one generation of people born from dubious cloning practices was enough.

“That’s great,” Dave said, keeping an eye on Jake and Dirk to ensure he wasn’t falling behind during his call. “We should take Luke and Alba for a week or two before they bring Asa home.”

“Yes!” Jade agreed. “I was thinking that, too! I hope the annex is finished in time.” As if on cue, John waltzed into view. He was sweaty and dusty, and walked right behind Jade toward the kitchen, failing to notice Dave, until Jade yelled at him to come back. He did, frowning, then finally saw the screen with Dave’s face on it. John’s face split into a huge, dopey grin. Egbert may have grown up hot, but he was still a dweeb.

“Hey, Dave!” he yelled unnecessarily loudly. Jade winced and whacked his shoulder. “The addition is coming along really well! I was just taking a lunch break. It’d go faster if my _dear sister_ would come help me out!”

“I am helping! I just needed a day off,” Jade sighed. “Dave would flip his shit if he came home to such a mess.”

Dave grinned, his earlier hunch confirmed. “I’ll help out when I get back, too. Maybe Jake and Dirk will stick around for a while.”

Who knew that John would end up loving building houses so much? Actually, Dave wasn’t that surprised. John had always been pretty obsessed with home, in his own way, so it didn’t seem all that farfetched that he’d end up liking to build them. That, and the hammer thing. He had quite a knack for designing and building houses from the ground up as well as gutting and renovating old homes, which he now spent most of his time doing. He employed a small team for most projects, but hadn’t brought anyone with him to work on Dave, Jade, and Karkat’s hive since it was a pretty small project and Jade had promised to help.

“Anyway, I better go, but y'all have fun. Say hi to Karkat for me.”

“See you tomorrow!”

Dave disconnected, then spiraled loosely back down to rejoin Dirk and Jake, passing Roxy as she floated along. He stopped to wave at Calliope and Jane before purposefully crashing straight into Jake. It took the other man by surprise but that was the only split second of Dave’s advantage before Jake had him pinned and was hooting about having to try harder to beat him at wrestling, even if he was going to cheat with aerial attacks.

“Dirk,” Dave gasped from the ground, “control your husband please.”

Dirk stepped forward as if to pull Jake off of Dave, then at the last second stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned down to smirk in Dave’s face. “He’s not my husband.” Jake grinned.

~-~-~

Jade popped into existence exactly when and where they had planned. She threw her arms around Dave enthusiastically enough to knock him back a step, then when she had squeezed him for a few seconds, turned her attention to the others. Once everyone had been properly greeted, she asked if everyone had everything, and there was a pause while backpacks were checked and sylladexes consulted, then nods were given all around (plus a “Darn skippy!” from Jake).

Pop. Back to Alterra Beta and the Troll Kingdom and their little corner of heaven (Dave called all of their homes ‘heaven’ since they were all gods, though Dirk had insisted on Olympus for his and Jake’s primary residence). They materialized right in the middle of the living room. Roxy landed on the coffee table.

John was the first one to greet them, running in from the back where the hive was closed off with plastic sheeting and blue painter’s tape. He was dusty and wearing safety goggles over his glasses, but no one really minded as he came barreling in for hugs. Dave returned the hug but was looking over John’s shoulder and up the stairs for signs of—

There he was, finally. Karkat, at the first floor landing, grinned at him as they met eyes over John’s muscly shoulders (seriously, spending all day sawing wood and hammering nails was apparently the way to go). It had been a good fifteen years since Karkat had changed from his adolescent to his adult body, and his tall figure and dark skin no longer made Dave double-take. At least, not from surprise. Hot damn.

John reached for Roxy, so Dave stepped away, going to meet Karkat at the stairs. He glanced over his shoulder and it seemed like everyone was pretty distracted, so he put a finger to his lips and took the stairs three at a time, grabbing Karkat’s hand and tugging him along behind him down the hallway and into their bedroom.

“How was Alterra Alpha?” Karkat asked as Dave closed the door behind him.

Dave wrapped his arms around his partner’s waist. “We met a tribe of scions named after me.”

Karkat arched an eyebrow above his blood-red eyes. “Tribe Douchebag?”

“Tribe Strider,” Dave said, snickering despite his attempt to make his voice sound shocked and hurt.

“So they were named for Dirk?”

Dave shoved Karkat back into the bed, laughing as the troll’s gangly limbs flailed a bit as he fell onto his back. Dave followed him down, one knee between Karkat’s legs, hands on his shoulders. Karkat’s eyebrows were arched in surprise, a fact Dave noticed smugly right before he went in for a kiss. He made it the best damn kiss he’d ever given, complete with every romance novel’s cliché of roaming tongue, nipping lips, breaths passed back and forth. His hands caressed skin under Karkat’s shirt, touching just where he knew the troll liked.

“What were you saying about Dirk?” he asked breathlessly as he pulled away, grinning.

Karkat grabbed the front of his shirt and flipped him over, rolling with the momentum so that he now straddled Dave’s lap. “Who’s Dirk?” he answered, and then his lips were on Dave’s neck and neither of them cared about Dirk or anyone else besides each other.

~-~-~

Jade barged in without knocking, as usual, while Karkat and Dave were snuggled up under the blanket on their bed, chatting about the trip.

“Ugh are you naked under there?” she asked, rolling her eyes.

“We can be naked not under here if you want,” Dave answered, starting to throw the covers off.

“No thank you!” she yelled hastily, screwing up her face to clearly communicate _euugh._ Dave settled back under the blanket with a smug look, raising an eyebrow at her. “You’re so gross, Dave.”

“Missed you, too, babe,” he said, and she grinned and came over and sat on the bed, carefully above the covers. “Did you come in here just to interrupt the post-coital pillow talk? I mean, cool, if you did, I guess, but you could have given us like five more minutes of blissful afterglow.”

She made the face again. “No! I came to tell you that dinner is ready and you should come down and stop ignoring our guests!”

Karkat threw off the covers and got up, nudity-ban notwithstanding, and stepped over Dave’s legs, then down off the bed to start looking for his discarded pants. Jade groaned. “Why, Karkat,” she whined. When Dave moved to also get up, she fled.

“She’s seen us naked a million times,” Karkat commented, grinning. “You’d think she’d be over it.”

“Do you want to see _her_ naked?” Dave asked, eyebrow arched as he fished a fresh pair of jeans out of his wardrobe, ready to never touch the ones he had trekked around the mountains in again.

“Ew, no.”

“Exactly.”

Their relationship was weird, but it worked for them.

Clothed and hungry, they made their way to dinner. Jade had gathered everyone together, popping back and forth to bring Jane and Calliope, and Rose and Kanaya and the kids, to dinner. This had already been the plan, so Dave and Karkat did exchange a guilty look for not being helpful with either the preparation of food or the welcoming of guests.

Of course, it was John who pointed this out, loudly and without guile, much to the amusement of everyone else.

And then it was a pleasant family dinner, food getting passed around, chairs scraping, children whining for more of the worst option on the table with mothers sighing over ignored vegetables. Stories about the mountains and scion settlements were told, Jake exaggerating only a little as he impressed everyone with tales of their exploits. As dinner wrapped up, gifts were fetched and passed about, and everyone cooed over their new books, jewelry, scarves, and trinkets.

Rose and Kanaya excused themselves to put Luke and Albana to bed, using Jade’s room for the children for the time being. Later, Jade would teleport the whole family home, but bedtime was bedtime and all the excitement had drained the itty-bitties anyway. Dessert was passed around as everyone else waited for the mothers to return.

When they did, and had gotten their own plates of the chocolate mousse cake, Roxy turned her excited smile to Karkat. “So, Karkitty! I hear the fabled book is done at last!”

“First of all,” Karkat began, rolling his eyes, “nobody calls me ‘Karkitty.’ Fuck you, Strider,” he said in a you’re-so-predictable tone as Dave snickered.

“Why do I get the feeling that some _one_ in particular does, in fact, call you Karkitty?” Dirk asked.

“Bro, do you really want to know?”

“Striders,” sighed Rose, and everyone else nodded in agreement.

 _”Anyway,”_ Roxy said pointedly, though she was grinning approvingly at Dave. “The book?”

“Yeah, the book,” Karkat sighed. “It’s done. You should probably take it back to the cave soon, Dave.”

Dave blinked, looked at Dirk and said, “The memory stick!” before realizing that Dirk had no idea what he was talking about, because for him, it hadn’t happened yet. Dave frowned. Where were they going to find that thing?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is more exciting, less aimless! Promise. I hope you enjoyed the slow pace of this one, though. Isn't it nice to see our babes doing their thing?
> 
> Terezi is still looking for Vriska. Time doesn't pass the same for her outside of the new universe. Don't worry, she isn't forgotten ;)
> 
> As always, your comments light up my day! Talk to me!


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